NVIDIA Showing Interactive Ray Tracing on GPUs at SIGGRAPH

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NVIDIA is showing an interactive ray tracing demo at SIGGRAPH that works using GPU power. Those of you attending the show will get to see the interactive demo, everyone else will have to make do with these 4 screenshots:

Based purely on NVIDIA GPU technology, the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application. At three bounces, performance is demonstrated at up to 30 frames per second (fps) at HD resolutions of 1920x1080 for an image-based lighting paint shader, ray traced shadows, and reflections and refractions running on four next-generation Quadro GPUs in an NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (VCS). The technology demonstration can be seen in the NVIDIA booth 554 during SIGGRAPH.
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Not exactly photorealistic is it. The lighting and those hard shadows really need some work. It's been years since I studied this stuff - is that a result of using point lighting versus more realistic global illumination?
 
Nemesis999 said:
Is it just me or does that look like a 5+ year old attempt at realistic graphics?
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Heh, the fake lighting and the overly shiny chrome material does remind me of my very first attempts with Bryce many years ago. Course, I didn't have any fancy models to import, so I had to settle for the ever popular sphere :p.
 
Not impressed at all.

Doesn't seem like raytracing at all, Race driver Grid looks much better and its not ray traced.
 
I was thinking the same thing... I guess this is nvidia's way of beating Intel to ray tracing marketing hype. The new Gran Trurismo looks much better IMO, and as they said above, Grid looks just as good if not better.
 
This may be a little OT but, when am I going to get a game that doesn't use these shiny car models? I am tired of having a dmg model without paint marks, or if its overcast in the game I still get perfect reflections of the environment...
 
"four next-generation Quadro GPUs in an NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (VCS)."

THAT is the reason why we won't have ray-traced games for a while.
 
Fharakin said:
This may be a little OT but, when am I going to get a game that doesn't use these shiny car models? I am tired of having a dmg model without paint marks, or if its overcast in the game I still get perfect reflections of the environment...
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Grid's damage scratches paint. Check it out.

It may not be graphically impressive, but it is real time raytracing, and it does look pretty high poly. If they tweaked the lighting and tossed in some shaders, it could look pretty good.
 
It's both cool and total crap at the same time.

Pretty much the only thing doing something like this not on a general purpose CPU are the ART hardware rendering engines. The raybox can produce stellar output in comparison to this, and it only costs about $4k. However, it isn't producing that output in real time or anything close to it. Granted, the $14k pricetag of the quadroplex 2100 D4 isn't nearly as cheap either.

It's basically an area that is vastly immature, and will improve at an insane pace simply because it will be able to borrow a lot of well ddeveloped concepts from existing technology rather than starting from step one.

If it is easily extensible by third parties, it will be insane.

I suspect in a couple year, in the world of research and high budget DCC, we will see this technology make a big impact.
 
Impressiveness severely hampered by the sterile, poorly-textured environment. Sorry, NVIDIA.
 
I think what we need to remember here is that while raster graphics are currently more visually impressive than these ray-tracing screenshots, this tech is only the beginning stages (even though its been around for umpteen years).

IMO give it another 5-10 years, the current system of raster graphics will hit a ceiling since the shadows/reflections/refractions won't be visually accurate enough to fool our minds into believing the scene is real. I would think that ray-tracing would be easier to program since programmers won't have to use tricks to accomplish the same thing in raster.

We still have a long way to go hardware-wise, but in the long run I think ray-traced is the way to go.
 
Raytracing is still in its infancy and it might look better as a video than screenshots, but this doesn't impress at all.
 
I did raytracing on my Amigas and script-based manual raytracing on the PC ages ago, we used to make jokes about realtime raytracing.. we're still this far away?

It's quite cool but I don't know what this is for, more than just an investor "ooh" and "aah" device. After the Cinema 2.0 presentation this lost what impressiveness it had.
 
It's a technical demo, not a game demo. They're not saying "hey, look at this, it's better than every racing game ever made", they're saying "here's a demonstration of ray-traced reflections and shadows of a car in real time". Is it a mature technology that we'll see in games any time soon? No, of course not. It's SIGGRAPH, not E3.
 
Litfod said:
It's a technical demo, not a game demo. They're not saying "hey, look at this, it's better than every racing game ever made", they're saying "here's a demonstration of ray-traced reflections and shadows of a car in real time". Is it a mature technology that we'll see in games any time soon? No, of course not. It's SIGGRAPH, not E3.
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Exactly, not everything is about gaming.
 
i am impressed, not because of the graphics, but because of how they have accomplished those graphics.

imagine a game where you can see someone sneak up behind you, or see a grenade falling from above you while you are looking at a puddle on the ground.

sure it looks like ass, but thats because we have accomplished more realistic looking things with tricks. but those tricks havent added anything to gameplay. just eye candy.
 
The shadows/lighting is a known problem for ray-traced images. Basically, while ray tracing is very good at drawing shadows for everything, it does so with absolute precision. Basically, light is calculated as coming from a point, and diffusion of light (which is what makes shadows soft) isn't accounted for. It can be worked around, as I've seen ray-tracing with soft shadows, but I'm not quite sure how it's done. Probably by having one point-light generate multiple rays at slightly different angles, but that would be very slow even by ray-traced standards, and I think the point here is that they're doing it in realtime on existing raster hardware.

The other thing to consider here is that the graphics card in your computer has for years been tailor made to producing raster images at acceptable realtime speeds. Such hardware for ray-tracing really hasn't had the same investment yet. I imagine a behemoth with hundreds of millions of transistors that's actually designed to do ray-tracing (akin to what we have with our raster cards today) would exhibit much better performance than hacking our raster hardware to do something it doesn't normally do.
 
aarmenaa said:
Basically, light is calculated as coming from a point, and diffusion of light (which is what makes shadows soft) isn't accounted for. It can be worked around, as I've seen ray-tracing with soft shadows, but I'm not quite sure how it's done.
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Point lighting hasn't been a limitation in ray-tracing for a long time. If you want soft, accurate shadows you basically just trace the lighting to an area rather than a point. Problem is, you then need a hell of lot more rays to get good results, slowing down what's already not the fastest way of doing things.
 
Fharakin said:
This may be a little OT but, when am I going to get a game that doesn't use these shiny car models? I am tired of having a dmg model without paint marks, or if its overcast in the game I still get perfect reflections of the environment...
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check out the Forza Motorsports series.
 
Any ray tracing demo should be a hybrid that's mixed with raster... otherwise it just looks shabby.
 
The reflections are impressive.

Everything else isn't.
 
Everything else isn't impressive because its irrelevant. Though it would look pretty spiffy to add all the shader effects available in today's games, that would take extra work for something that doesn't matter, or isnt important (in this case).
 
I call Bullshot.

If there isn't a chrome sphere floating above a marble tile floor, then it isn't a ray-tracing demo. :p
 
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