4 ms·

This headline would have been true in 1989... not quite today.

explorigin 8y ago
This article is talking about "real-time" ray-tracing which is a jump for today's tech.
mikestew 8y ago
Must we immediately jump to the dismissive portion of our comments section? Go watch that video. And you're telling me that if Nvidia can pull that shit off in real-time on a consumer card, your response is "meh, 1989 called..."?
Sohcahtoa82 8y ago
Your comment baffles me. In 1989, we were nowhere CLOSE to real-time ray-tracing. Even real-time textured triangle-based rendering was beyond our capabilities. We just didn't have the necessary memory bandwidth or CPU power. Around the year 2000, we had a couple graphics demos that featured real-time ray-tracing (like Nature Suxx), but they were quite limited.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  AT&T Pixel Machines PXM 900 Series http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/pixel_machine/Pixel_Machine_Brochure_1987.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/pixel_machine/Pixel_Machine_Bro... "The PXM 900 Series uses 32 bit floating-point processors exclusively. So floating-point-intensive algorithms -- like those used for image processing and ray-tracing -- can be implemented directly at the frame buffer level for real-time processing." http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/ray-tracing-gems-book-call-for-participation/ http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/ray-tracing-gems-book-... "As far as “considered unattainable for decades” goes, interactive ray tracing has been attained long ago, just not for (non-trivial) video games or other interactive applications. My first encounter with an interactive ray tracer was AT&T’s Pixel Machine back in 1987. I had put out the Standard Procedural Databases on Usenet the week before SIGGRAPH, and was amazed to see that they had grabbed them and were rendering some in just a few seconds. But the real excitement was a little postage-stamp (well, maybe 6 stamps) sized rendering, where you could interactively use a mouse to control a shiny sphere’s position atop a Mandrill plane texture." The only reason I remember that this hardware existed is that it was mentioned in the book I first learned C programming from.

This article is talking about "real-time" ray-tracing which is a jump for today's tech.

Must we immediately jump to the dismissive portion of our comments section? Go watch that video. And you're telling me that if Nvidia can pull that shit off in real-time on a consumer card, your response is "meh, 1989 called..."?

Sohcahtoa82 8y ago

Your comment baffles me. In 1989, we were nowhere CLOSE to real-time ray-tracing. Even real-time textured triangle-based rendering was beyond our capabilities. We just didn't have the necessary memory bandwidth or CPU power. Around the year 2000, we had a couple graphics demos that featured real-time ray-tracing (like Nature Suxx), but they were quite limited.

philipkglass 8y ago
AT&T Pixel Machines PXM 900 Series http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/pixel_machine/Pixel_Machine_Brochure_1987.pdf http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/pixel_machine/Pixel_Machine_Bro... "The PXM 900 Series uses 32 bit floating-point processors exclusively. So floating-point-intensive algorithms -- like those used for image processing and ray-tracing -- can be implemented directly at the frame buffer level for real-time processing." http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/ray-tracing-gems-book-call-for-participation/ http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/ray-tracing-gems-book-... "As far as “considered unattainable for decades” goes, interactive ray tracing has been attained long ago, just not for (non-trivial) video games or other interactive applications. My first encounter with an interactive ray tracer was AT&T’s Pixel Machine back in 1987. I had put out the Standard Procedural Databases on Usenet the week before SIGGRAPH, and was amazed to see that they had grabbed them and were rendering some in just a few seconds. But the real excitement was a little postage-stamp (well, maybe 6 stamps) sized rendering, where you could interactively use a mouse to control a shiny sphere’s position atop a Mandrill plane texture." The only reason I remember that this hardware existed is that it was mentioned in the book I first learned C programming from.