PowerVR's Real time Ray Tracing shown at Mobile World Congress

[Pottsey]

Short clip about PowerVR's Real time Ray Tracing the most noticeable point is how it lower development time by around 20% as artists no longer have to mess around with shadows and lights.

It's a shames the demo is on a Prototype FPGA board. Its going be interesting to see what happens on a PCI Express Caustic Two board later this year. Still the Caustic two will not be for gaming.

http://vimeo.com/19937145 seems to be what PowerVR are aiming to get for mobiles devices a few years down the line.

EDIT: Another video of what the goal is down the line http://vimeo.com/19944447

 

[Rroff]

They were getting an average of ~6fps in a tiny, tiny window... not really that remarkable I've been playing around with similiar systems that can get ~5fps @ 320x240 on the CPU.

 

[Final8y]

They were getting an average of ~6fps in a tiny, tiny window... not really that remarkable I've been playing around with similiar systems that can get ~5fps @ 320x240 on the CPU.

Didn't NV's car ray tracing demo get 1920x1080 30fps.

NVIDIA has announced that it can calculate ray traced imagery on the fly using its GPUs, claiming an industry first. 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.” if you want to get down and dirty, then the image shown here was displayed at three bounces, performance was 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).

Now, I know ray tracing is incredibly complex and calc heavy, but, really, if this is an industry first, shouldn’t these images look better? I guess my point is that whether its full ray tracing, or fudged (some systems, like Autodesk Showcase, have some tricks to get over the calc hurdle), I think today’s users expect more in terms of depth of realism.

Found it at the bottom.
http://develop3d.com/tags/tag/gpu

 

[Pottsey]

It was an Prototype FPGA board which explains the slowness. It was more what was said that was interesting not the speed. Once they move off the FPGA board to PCI Express we should see a massive speed improvement.

EDIT: As I understand it FPGA boards are to verify that hardware designs are good. These boards are programmable and are very slow. They are more proof of concept before you move into manufacturing a real board.

 

[Pottsey]

Nvidia garage car ray tracing rendering takes about 10 to 20minets to render one FPS with 1 GPU.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cool_stuff.html#/demos/2116 might be slow but it's still pretty neat and shows the benefits of ray tracing.

 

[xsistor]

It was an Prototype FPGA board which explains the slowness. It was more what was said that was interesting not the speed. Once they move off the FPGA board to PCI Express we should see a massive speed improvement.

EDIT: As I understand it FPGA boards are to verify that hardware designs are good. These boards are programmable and are very slow. They are more proof of concept before you move into manufacturing a real board.

FPGAs aren't slow. FPGAs, MPGAs etc, are just a different ways of manufacturing a digital circuit or a SoC or something at small scale. That also makes them ideal for prototyping. You stop using FPGAs/MPGAs/CPLDs etc for high volume because it starts to become cheaper to fabricate ASICs.
FPGAs on boards normally support a wide range of protocols (even TCP/IP stack) allowing you to easily interface one of those to a computer or embedded system in numerous ways.
PCI Express is just one example of the type of bus that can be used, and what he's saying is that when they go into manufacturing they'll have an ASIC that connects to a computer via PCI Express (like a graphics card).

There is nothing stopping you from using PCI express with an FPGA. these are two different things. It is FPGA and ASIC that are similar but with differences. It's not a move from FPGA to PCI Express. It's a move from FPGA to ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit). You're misinterpreting what he says in the video.


Anyway, this is a great video you've found. It was predicted in the electronics engineering community a long time that systems will progressively decouple features and remove them from the CPU progressively, and then they will get coupled back into the CPU. This is called the "Circle of Reincarnation" (or something to the effect), and one example is how the GPU and PhysX processors became discrete external devices. This raytracing chip is yet another example.

 

[Duff-Man]

Nvidia garage car ray tracing rendering takes about 10 to 20minets to render one FPS with 1 GPU.

Um...

There are plenty of videos on youtube that show it performing real-time rendering. The framerate isn't great (appears to be sub 10fps for the most part), but 10 - 20 minutes per frame? Where the hell did you pull that number from?

 

[metalmackey]

Pottsey is a self confessed fanboy of PowerVR. We all know fanboys don't listen to arguments against their "thing".

metalmackey said "Do you own or have a lot of shares in PowerVR or sommit? Why is it "good news" the these companies are choosing PowerVR over something else?"
Yes I own shares as I predicted the change in technology and rise of GPU's in phones after lots of research. Most people called me mad but hey, look where we are now quad core and better GPU's with quad CPU's coming in phones. Yes I am Fan boy and its good news as this is really pushing technology forward. Sometimes the better and/or faster technology doesn't get implanted. Lastly graphics technology is a hobby of mine and the markets have been boring recently. Things were much more interesting now with more players

 

[Pottsey]

I didn't have time to download it and read the forum about it. Everyone was talking about 10 to 20 minuets to render the one frame. Will edit in the link here when I have been though my history.

EDIT: I see the confusion. It does a cut down ray tracing mode for real time that looks poor then when you stop moving the camera it starts doing full ray tracing with lots of extra rays. To render the screen perfectly with high quality ray tracing it takes 10 to 50 minutes per frame.

One of the few videos in real time and not speeded up. The 35 second part is a good example. The high quality shots in that video took 50mins to render.