Intel Visual Computing Developer Community

[HardOCP News]

Intel’s new Visual Computing Developer Community website has gone live. The site has articles, guides, developer news, featured contributors, tools and much more. Definitely worth checking out regardless whether or not you are a developer, there's a little something for everyone.

 

[zzebi]

It's quite frustrating how intel people want us to believe that ray tracing is the way to go for computer graphics. They say that ray traced images are totally realistic and will once replace the current rasterization pipelines. This is simply not the case.
Once and for all: ray tracing is not realistic! It is not an accurate model of real world light propagation since it is not a global illumination algorithm. This as well is a simplified lighting model. The only possible use I can see is to approximate refraction and reflection more accurately than the current pixel shader hacks. In every other case there are good (and much faster) rasterization techniques to produce identical or as good results.
RT in itself produces very artificial looking results. Even if we had a whole hour to render a single frame using RT, the result wouldn't look realistic. If we tried to render a singe frame of Crysis using RT, it would take several minutes and the result wouldn't even look better, maybe even worse, since the game's graphics engine supports lots of effects that cannot be easily done using RT (for example soft shadows or light scattering).
In realistic 3D rendering softwares RT is only used some rare cases (like computing refraction). For the best results these softwares use radiosity. In fact the best tradeoff is to use a clever mixture of radiosity, ray tracing, and rasterization.
Unfortunately dynamic global illumination algorithms are significantly more computationally intensive than RT so we won't see them anytime soon in computer games.

 

[pxc]

It's quite frustrating how intel people want us to believe that ray tracing is the way to go for computer graphics.

Larrabee is about rasterization: http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14624

Ray tracing just happens to be a good demonstration of using many cores and can be compared to desktop performance directly. It's also still novel enough to attract attention.