The Ray Tracing talk videos from GDC are online.

[Pottsey]

Practical Techniques for Ray Tracing in Games
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020688/Practical-Techniques-for-Ray-Tracing

New Techniques Made Possible by PowerVR Ray Tracing Hardware
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020741/New-Techniques-Made-Possible-by

The below link has the SDK for download and one of the ray tracing demos.
http://www.imgtec.com/powervr/powervr_openrl_sdk.asp

Once you have the SDK or just the run time installed. Download http://cdn.imgtec.com/OpenRLSDK/OpenRL-Hybrid-Example.zip for a demo based around shadows.

Overall I found it very impressive and was really surprised at just how much dev development time it saves. The speaker took around 60seconds to code some shaders live on stage which did shadows and reflections for the entire scene. So simple, looks great and no spending hours messing around with lightmaps.

I was also impressed with the car scene shining its headlights at the wall. Amazing lights and shadows. Same for the shadows in the city no artifacts, no low resolution problems no matter how close you get.

 

[Silent_Scone]

You're obsessed with Ray tracing huh.

 

[Pottsey]

Yes it’s partly where all the invention is. Typical Desktop GPUs have stagnated a lot in recently years. Hybrid GPU's are the way forward and its better for everyone. Us end users and developers.

 

[drunkenmaster]

In reality ray tracing has little invention, it's significantly more simple than rasterising currently is, by several magnitudes. Ray tracing just kinda works, and was producing great images decades ago, it's only down side is the power it takes to do. Simple but incredibly performance intensive. Rasterising has for decades now become more and more complex, imitating ray tracing as much as possible with year on year innovation to hardware and software methods of doing so.

Almost all the invention is in rasterisation, ray tracing is just the thing that will happen pretty quickly once we hit the power levels required to run it.

Look where ray tracing was(in quality) 20 years ago vs today, then look at rasterised images from 20 years ago vs 20, it's clear where all the change has happened.

Desktop gpu's are advancing as fast as the process nodes allow. If you half the gap every 2 years between rasterisation and ray tracing, the steps get ever smaller but the power required to make that step is the same, that is the situation rasterisation is in.

Ray tracing was always the end goal, it was never in question, it was merely a question of when the industry top to bottom had the power to do it. The increasing amount of power required for ever smaller improvements in rasterisation means the industry looks set to bring in ray tracing for portions of scenes but do most of the things via rasterisation, your hybrid setups.

 

[Freddie1980]

Maybe PowerVR should consider starting up it's desktop GPU division again. Given all their technical know how on getting the most performance out of a SOC that uses several watts it would be interesting to see even just a mid level card could compete against the establishment in terms of performance.

 

[Pottsey]

In reality ray tracing has little invention, it's significantly more simple than rasterising currently is, by several magnitudes. Ray tracing just kinda works, and was producing great images decades ago, it's only down side is the power it takes to do. Simple but incredibly performance intensive. Rasterising has for decades now become more and more complex, imitating ray tracing as much as possible with year on year innovation to hardware and software methods of doing so.

Almost all the invention is in rasterisation, ray tracing is just the thing that will happen pretty quickly once we hit the power levels required to run it.

Look where ray tracing was(in quality) 20 years ago vs today, then look at rasterised images from 20 years ago vs 20, it's clear where all the change has happened.

Desktop gpu's are advancing as fast as the process nodes allow. If you half the gap every 2 years between rasterisation and ray tracing, the steps get ever smaller but the power required to make that step is the same, that is the situation rasterisation is in.

Ray tracing was always the end goal, it was never in question, it was merely a question of when the industry top to bottom had the power to do it. The increasing amount of power required for ever smaller improvements in rasterisation means the industry looks set to bring in ray tracing for portions of scenes but do most of the things via rasterisation, your hybrid setups.

Drunkenmaster you clearly never watched or did watch but didn’t understand the videos posted. There was some massive invention going on.
Incredibly performance intensive! If you had watched the video you would have seen some of the incredibly invention they did so that it’s not performance intensive. It’s not working on mobile due to raw power its working due to innovation.

How can you call the hybrid rendering anything but invention?
How is ray tracing being used for game AI not classed as innovation? What about all the other stuff they did like Physics?
EDIT: They went ahead and solved the bandwidth problem without raw power or watts yet another example of invention.

 

[Pottsey]

Another video only this one has all the tech speak removed and focuses on the benefits for games. Cannot wait to see this on full speed hardware and in games.