Theory: Intel and Ray Tracing

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EQTakeOffense

[H]ard|Gawd
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Sep 12, 2002
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So, I have an interesting theory: Intel's new discrete graphics unit (Visual Computing Group) will put out a ray traced optimized GPU.

It seems odd that for the amount of research that Intel has been investigating into ray tracing for the past few years, that earlier this year, only after much research on the topic did, they create their graphics unit.

Just seems that, after the R&D they're putting into it, they have to be doing it for one reason or another....
 
EQTakeOffense said:
So, I have an interesting theory: Intel's new discrete graphics unit (Visual Computing Group) will put out a ray traced optimized GPU.

It seems odd that for the amount of research that Intel has been investigating into ray tracing for the past few years, that earlier this year, only after much research on the topic did, they create their graphics unit.

Just seems that, after the R&D they're putting into it, they have to be doing it for one reason or another....
Click to expand...

Hang on, I gotta find my Captain Obvious graphic. I will be right back. ;)
 
Was reading this on the front page, is there any video of quake 4 using raytracing? All i can find are stills. :confused:
 
Not sure, but PCPer ran a good follow up article today.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=506

Good stuff. Everything that I have heard is that Intel is squarely focusing on ray tracing. Seems impossible to do it from square one, and their employee that wrote the PCPer article seems to think that "blended" modes are not the way to go.

It is going to be very interesting to see what happens. Intel certainly have the resources to attempt to push anything they want to into the game dev community.
 
Oh, there's absolutely nothing wrong with raytracing. We just didn't have the processing power back when 3D accelerators took off, so they settled on raster 3D graphics with an approximated lighting model instead. As GPUs became more capable, effects were added to make the graphics almost as capable as raytracers.

But it was never the plan to stick with raster 3D, that was just a stopgap. People were already doing software 3D raster engines because the performance requirements were so low, so the move to run these accelerated using hardware was an obvious step.

At the point we've reached, we're finally capable of doing it in real-time. Right now GPUs can actually do a pretty good job of it, and in the future, general-purpose multi-core processors will make GPUs obsolete.
 
This is pretty exciting to think we can move away from raster graphics. I keep imagining ray tracing combined with that head-mounted perspective unit made up of only infra-red leds and the Nintendo Wiimote the guy contructed and it's really a brilliant solution to making faux-perspective/depth perception look amazing on a 2D monitor.
 
I think that PS3 will benefit from Ray tracing in games with its Cell Processor.
 
alg7_munif said:
I think that PS3 will benefit from Ray tracing in games with its Cell Processor.
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Not likely, Sony was going to do that initially, but they decided to go with RSX because it just wasn't reasonable. When you add AI, physics and control code, Cell just doesn't have enough brunt to do ray tracing. And even without all that, 6 dedicated SPUs is pushing it regarding ray tracing.

See here: real-time raytracing with THREE PS3s in a cluster:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8

For next-generation consoles however, ray tracing is quite possible. It would save money on a separate graphics chip.
 
defaultluser said:
Not likely, Sony was going to do that initially, but they decided to go with RSX because it just wasn't reasonable. When you add AI, physics and control code, Cell just doesn't have enough brunt to do ray tracing. And even without all that, 6 dedicated SPUs is pushing it regarding ray tracing.

See here: real-time raytracing with THREE PS3s in a cluster:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8

For next-generation consoles however, ray tracing is quite possible. It would save money on a separate graphics chip.
Click to expand...

Well it's not going to be a sudden change so RSX is still needed but if developers are going into ray tracing direction slowly, I think that the Cell+RSX combination will have an advantage.
 
alg7_munif said:
Well it's not going to be a sudden change so RSX is still needed but if developers are going into ray tracing direction slowly, I think that the Cell+RSX combination will have an advantage.
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The PC Perspective article disagrees with you.

So it is understandable that people have it in their minds that ray tracing should be introduced in small steps. The only problem is: Technically it makes no sense.
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http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=506&type=expert&pid=7

Once the raw power is out there I can see this taking over very quickly... Makes me wonder what nVidia will be left doing :D
 
EQTakeOffense said:
So, I have an interesting theory: Intel's new discrete graphics unit (Visual Computing Group) will put out a ray traced optimized GPU.

It seems odd that for the amount of research that Intel has been investigating into ray tracing for the past few years, that earlier this year, only after much research on the topic did, they create their graphics unit.

Just seems that, after the R&D they're putting into it, they have to be doing it for one reason or another....
Click to expand...

This has been known for many months, if not a full year now. And it's not a "GPU" persay, it's likely to be many x86 based cores.
 
It is possible to use GPUs to do ray tracing but even with its brute horse power they can't render in real time yet.
 
I guess, my first question would be when do you think we'll see an Intel/AMD/nVidia ray tracing solution.

It seems that the natural step for the GPU is to turn it into another CPU, or are CPU's becoming so powerful that in 10 years we'll no longer need a GPU/PPU?

Which is more efficient: Having an 80 Core 3.0Ghz CPU doing ray tracing, physics, AI ext. or having a 40 Core 3.0Ghz CPU but with specialized ray tracing, physics, and AI add-in cards?
 
Intel materials say approx 2 years away.
 
Either way the Intel strategic marketing guys must be having "happy pants" thinking about all the cores they could sell.

Backwards compatiblity with existing OS and games is the only fly in the ointment I can see but if we can have Quad SLI I guess a raster card and a ray card in a machine is not a lot deal with.
 
kllrnohj said:
Makes me wonder what nVidia will be left doing :D
Click to expand...

I was at a meeting for shareholders at Nvidia last fall. They showed a photorealistic demo of an Audio R8 being raytraced. Jen Hsun mentioned how these simulations would help car designers see potential issues before having to make a working prototype like seeing how light would react going through the windows
 
kuyaglen said:
I was at a meeting for shareholders at Nvidia last fall. They showed a photorealistic demo of an Audio R8 being raytraced. Jen Hsun mentioned how these simulations would help car designers see potential issues before having to make a working prototype like seeing how light would react going through the windows
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I was more asking since CPU powered raytracing is what PCPer was talking about being the [near?] future. Once CPUs start running raytracing engines just fine, nVidia isn't going to have much of a market left...
 
Ray-tracing is over-rated. Pixar didn't even use raytracing before Cars, and they have hundreds of CPUs. Even now they use compex hybrid techniques.

Games are doing pretty well at producing raytracing like effects. Crysis has a unified lighting system, Half-Life 2 has lots of water with reflections. Real time global illumination/radiosity will be more important for the look of games.
 
I heard that there's some graphics effects that will be a pain to render under ray tracking. I heard that the best way is a hybrid combination of Ray Tracking and Raster. After all, deferred rendering gives the most flexibility in the light rendering under the raster, and isn't much behind of ray tracking.
 
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