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I remember writing a ray tracing in 1994 in Turbo Pascal 7.0 running on 286 under DOS 4.0 at the time. I did it with floating numbers, pure mathematical impleme

I remember writing a ray tracing in 1994 in Turbo Pascal 7.0 running on 286 under DOS 4.0 at the time. I did it with floating numbers, pure mathematical implementation. When it came to usability was something like 1 frame every 30 seconds for resolution of 640x480 with 256 colors only. The problem with ray tracing isn't writing one, the problem is its usability, to get the most realistic AND fast enough. Mine was very realistic for that resolution but the snail FPS was something unbearable. Despite my best efforts at the time, hardware was not ready. I remember the talk between us (prof. assistant, basically a master student and rest of wanna be programmers) and we're so sure it would take maximum 5 years for ray tracing and photo-realism to become every day commodity. We were wrong only by 20 years. Good times.

pixelpoet 6y ago
640x480 256 colours on a 286? With only 30 seconds for an image, even though it doesn't have a floating point unit? Sorry for being a doubting Thomas, but that seems very implausible (having spent my life writing ray tracers).
dahart 6y ago
> we're so sure it would take maximum 5 years for ray tracing and photo-realism to become every day commodity. We were wrong only by 20 years. Good times. Yeah that was a very long running joke about ray tracing: “real-time ray tracing is only five years away... and always will be”. ;) > The problem with ray tracing isn’t writing one, the problem is its usability, to get the most realistic AND fast enough. Times sure have changed eh? 640x480/30s is ~ 10k rays/sec. Now we have ray tracing GPUs that can do well over 10B rays/sec with full floating point. More than a million times faster, not even counting precision & scene size, crazy right?! I’m working in the field and still blown away by what people are doing in real time in the last few years, fully path traced scenes with global illumination that are hard to distinguish from photographs...

pixelpoet 6y ago

640x480 256 colours on a 286? With only 30 seconds for an image, even though it doesn't have a floating point unit? Sorry for being a doubting Thomas, but that seems very implausible (having spent my life writing ray tracers).

dahart 6y ago

> we're so sure it would take maximum 5 years for ray tracing and photo-realism to become every day commodity. We were wrong only by 20 years. Good times. Yeah that was a very long running joke about ray tracing: “real-time ray tracing is only five years away... and always will be”. ;) > The problem with ray tracing isn’t writing one, the problem is its usability, to get the most realistic AND fast enough. Times sure have changed eh? 640x480/30s is ~ 10k rays/sec. Now we have ray tracing GPUs that can do well over 10B rays/sec with full floating point. More than a million times faster, not even counting precision & scene size, crazy right?! I’m working in the field and still blown away by what people are doing in real time in the last few years, fully path traced scenes with global illumination that are hard to distinguish from photographs...