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Real-time Ray Tracing With Three PS3s

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For those of you that might not have seen it yet, there is a really cool video showing real-time ray tracing on three PS3s at once. Definitely a must see.

Ray-tracing is the rendering technique used by the film industry and is considered to complex for today's game systems. The code was written using IBM Cell SDK 2.0 on Linux. The iRT is totally scalable and only requires one Cell SPE to run. More PS3s = More SPEs = Higher client frame rates. All images are at least 720p 4x multi-sampled, with dynamic light sources, procedurally generated atmosphere, and dynamic shadows (more)
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*Wonders when the first overpriced-console/BR comment will be made?

On the topic of the video, very neat.
 
Saw this in the related video section, give a bit of info on iRT: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEg7q2lk3QM&mode=related&search=
Even though the PS3's RSX is inaccessible under Linux the smart little system will reach out across the network and leverage multiple IBM QS20 blades to render the complex model, in real-time, with software based ray-tracing. Using IBM's scalable iRT rendering technology, the PS3 is able to decompose each frame into manageable work regions and dynamically distribute them to blades or other PS3s for rendering. These regions are then further decomposed into sub-regions by the blade's Cell processors and dynamically dispatched to the heavy lifting SPEs for rendering and image compression. Finished encoded regions are then sent back to the PS3 for Cell accelerated decompression, compositing, and display.
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Here is another video of the Cell Broadband engine doing raytracing calculations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr-R4bUZIQw&mode=related&search=
 
That is pretty amazing. Hopefully we have CPU's/GPU's capable of this fully in the next few years. Ray Tracing is awesome.
 
I just dig on the whole tech aspect of using all three PS3s to tackle the task. A lot of time, energy and effort went into what they were showing. Technical merits alone earn it a thumbs up
 
Damn... I want to try this, but from what Sony tells me it's impossible to find one PS3, let alone 3. I guess I won't even bother looking around.
 
thats quite amazing, and from what i've read it seems that ray tracing is purely calculating and such, with a little drawing obviously but the bulk of the work is actually calculating all the hit angles or w/e it is they have to calculate. so GPUs are not going to be a big help in that
 
miskari said:
thats quite amazing, and from what i've read it seems that ray tracing is purely calculating and such, with a little drawing obviously but the bulk of the work is actually calculating all the hit angles or w/e it is they have to calculate. so GPUs are not going to be a big help in that
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Quite the contrary

Both ATI and nvidia are pushing their GPU's as stream processors so they can be used for physics, folding and or course ray tracing. IIRC nvidia has been working on raytracing via pixel shaders (now unified shaders) since the geforce 5800.
 
I don't even think a R600 or 8800GTX could help much.
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The company I contract for has been using videocards (nVidia) for global illumination/photon casting and raytracing since 2002. Back then on the gf4200 it took 20 minutes a frame where Maya/3DS Max/Lightwave took 3~4 times as long. Now, on my 8800 it's damn near realtime @1080p with volumetric clouds.

I'd rather see a renderfarm manager/client for the PS3 ;). A decent renderfarm machine is about the same price, and takes up more space.
 
That's cool, but but it took three to get a fairly simple scene in real time. It's won't be useful for game, but I can think of a lot of applications where it would be useful. Heck, if GPU's are goos enough at this stuff, we could see in PC games soon.


Anyone remember that guy who set up a bunch of PCs awhile back to do Quack 3 and later 4 with real time ray tracing?
 
http://www.openrt.de/Applications/boeing777.php

with a quadcore Intel, especially that dual quadcore Apple is selling it would render this quite a bit faster than the PS3 is doing the car. I was running realtime ray tracing apps 3 years ago, of course, none were as complex as this.

I wanted to comment on Youtube but someone disabled the comments..

Not saying it's not impressive. They're doing this on.. $1800? worth of hardware when it would take a $3000 PC to the same.. but people are all freaking out about it, "omg this is unheard of Raytracing in realtime!!!!11", any one of you could easily find a dozen ray tracing demos you can run at 60fps+ on a dualcore CPU, in high resolutions.
That comment about Pixar replacing all of their systems with PS3s really bothers me...

and that jet is 350,000 polygons, a bit bigger than the car.
 
True, but as you pointed out the price for the PS3 is a good bit less than a traditional workstation.
 
The Cell is definitely an amazing value, there's no doubt about that

but remember, Intel profits on their CPUs, this system is costing Sony money. I'd bet if Apple was selling their new systems at a loss they could best the PS3 at Price per performance for applications like this... then again, they don't exactly need the BD player to do ray tracing.

But my main point is that it bothers me when people think that the PS3 is some super computer that can best anything being built and all for $600, it's simply not true.
 
This brings back memories of the good old days when I was working with LightWave 3D v3.1 on my A3000.
I loved to use the Trace Reflection and Trace Refraction, but hated the additional render time.
I did one complex scene that took my Amiga 3000 030/25mhz 7 days to render one frame (752x486 with 4 or 8x AA(whatever was the max back then) and Raytrace enabled).
The image looked like crap. :(
 
Anyone remember ray traced Quake 3 video a few years back? It took them like a year to render it lol.
 
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