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Oh ray tracing, the nuclear fusion of computer graphics. It's coming! It's amazing! Meanwhile the industry still keeps burning coal. For applications that dea
by jpxxx 14y ago
Oh ray tracing, the nuclear fusion of computer graphics. It's coming! It's amazing! Meanwhile the industry still keeps burning coal.
For applications that deal in perfect lighting, yes it's probably a useful technique that would benefit from hardware support. But where is the real-world benefit for the rest of us? For most consumers, lighting provides about 2% of a game's value and 0% of everything else.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoSo I sympathize with this point of view, but the difference can be pretty stunning. Although between getting ray tracing or getting something like NURBs as the fundamental unit of geometry composition I'd probably lean toward the latter as a bigger 'win.' One of the things about ray tracing that was unexpected for me was that you could use a lower pixel resolution and get a higher fidelity 'feel' for the render.
- Arelius 14y agoUgh, not NURBS again, they are so much harder to control for high-detail surfaces you see for modern organics, and provide little to no advantages to hard and most environmental surfaces. Leave NURBS to vehicle and product CAD, where it's actually very useful
- norswap 14y agoI for one, believe it would considerably simplify the implementation of graphics engines. To make rasterization look good you have to do a lot of optimizations and go trough a very long pipeline. You don't have this problem with ray-tracing. Plus the same base technique (ray-tracing) can be used for a lot of problems in graphics: visibility checking, lighting, reflections, diffraction, motion blur, ...
- jpxxx 14y agoI've heard as much too. It'd be interesting to see today's best raster effort put against the same game assets in a ray-traced engine with a real-world game going on. Anything can look good when you've got 10 minutes and 500 processors. I want to see what happens in 16ms. :)
- Arelius 14y agoI mean, as a good point, ray tracing still isn't fast enough for the vast majority of pre-computed rendering for motion pictures. See PRMan and the majority of other modern renderers that all use still use the REYES algorithm. Sure, a unbiased renderer is great when you just need a single still without a huge amount of tweaking, but when you need motion ray tracing -everything- will remain impractically slow for a very long time.
- zxcdw 14y agoSince you're concerned with frametimes, let's also add in the asset production pipeline and effort. As it's been mentioned, cutting edge rasterizing consists of lengthy pipeline for every single effect imaginable(also sometimes to the graphics assets, mind you) while raytracing does all that almost by default(soft shadows and global illumination are problematic for example, path tracing fixes this but is some two orders of magnitude slower). The real problem with raytracing is that it's asymptotic computational complexity is far worse when you count scene objects. To compensate this you either lower the resolution or lower the lifetime of a ray(how many bounces it's allowed to make).
- jpxxx 14y ago