NVIDIA Launches The World's First Interactive Ray Tracing Engine

[Rroff]

I think it will be quite awhile before we see caustics, etc. heh

But for specific shadow effects, etc. I think it will happen sooner rather than later.

 

[Xappy]

Yeah I know, just it seems a little pointless to develop real time raytracing and just use it for shadows when I'm not sure it's really required for accurate shadowing considering how well made some modern shaders are..

 

[jigger]

I agree Xappy, it sort of defeats the objective of ray tracing when the real benefits of ray tracing are what you can do after for a tiny over head.

 

[Rroff]

Even with modern shaders tho shadows are generally split between 3 different systems (static/lightmaps, stencil and projected shadow maps) and you get a mis-match of objects that are and aren't shadowed, some stuff is self shadowing and other stuff isn't, etc.

 

[OldComputerGuy7]

Looks interesting, lets hope it becomes useful in games one day.

 

[Duff-Man]

Ray tracing is the way forward...

I agree with what was said earlier though, regarding consoles. The PC-only market is not big enough that it can support such a radically different rendering technique on its own. The majority of high-end PC titles these days are either console ports, or have console-specific versions. Until hardware capable of real-time ray tracing is available in consoles (which will probably happen with the next generation), we won't see it supported within PC games. It's simply not worth the extra effort for developers to produce two radically different engines for one game.

Ray tracing really is the most natural way of rendering though. It's inevitable that the switch will be made at some point - hopefully reasonably soon.

 

[Rroff]

Consoles could be where this emerges :S they can add the hardware support as part of the spec, consumers won't complain about having to buy yet another card, and even re-use it for other stuff within the console and typically consoles don't run as high res as PCs for gaming - even a lot of games running "1080p" are just upscaling from 600 px.

 

[jigger]

Consoles are breathing down the necks of PC's. I bet you the next round of consoles are technically as good as a middle of the road PC for gaming.

 

[capriboy1978]

It was done on Commodore Amiga 4000's backed up with a boat load of video toasters. The Motorola 68040, happy days.

Too true. I never ran an 040 machine, too expensive for a teenager. I had great fun putting my 030 a1200 back together a while back. Workbench was a dream off the hdd, only problem's were i couldn't find many games/password lists and it all looked crap on a tv as i sold my commodore monitor years ago.

 

[D D Danneh]

Consoles are breathing down the necks of PC's. I bet you the next round of consoles are technically as good as a middle of the road PC for gaming.

Of course, but you can't fault their value. Would Joe Bloggs buy a £250 console with games constantly being released, or a £600+ PC?

Yeah, to us, it's worth it because we can build our own, we know what's going into it, etc, but poor Joe doesn't know how to slot in a new graphics card, so he just buys the next console when it comes round.