9 ms·

SIGGRAPH 2009 Realtime GPU Raytracing Demo

38 points by jawngee 17y ago

nailer 17y ago
This seems somewhat less impressive that the raytraced Quake 3 from a few years ago, which has a higher framerate, less on-screen artifacts, and is also a well known application. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNZt3yDXno http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNZt3yDXno
- jawngee 17y ago
  Except this demo isn't rendered on a farm like the quake demo is, plus does caustics, global illumination and is more suitable for professional application than the quake demo is.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
trapper 17y ago
I'm surprised this field hasn't moved forward as much as I thought. If memory serves me correctly, I remember being shown a cuda based real time ray tracer, with similar limitations by a masters student in early 2007. They ran into lot's of troubles because of the architecture of cuda itself (e.g. maximum occupancy was never very high on average), but could produce stunning realtime visuals at low framerate (e.g. 640x480). Not different from these guys at all. At higher resolutions it was much, much harder as the solutions didn't scale because of the limitations of cuda. I expected to see him presenting his stuff at siggraph but never did - not sure what happened to him, and an internet search reveals nothing.
pmorici 17y ago
Not really that impressive, esp. compared to the product offered by Caustic graphics that has been posted here before, http://www.caustic.com/ http://www.caustic.com/ they do realtime ray tracing with a piece of hard ware a kin to a graphics card that fits in a desktop.
- manvsmachine 17y ago
  Except that the total cost of investment is a $350 piece of commodity hardware and a free/open SDK. If it's not fast enough, just throw in more / faster cards. Using Caustic's platform means putting min. $4K into a unproven proprietary platform. If performance/price didn't matter, you might as well say "Not that impressive, considering you can just build a render farm". No disrepect to Caustic, but I could easily see them going the way of Ageia if they're not careful.
  - pmorici 17y ago
    I see your point but is the target audience for this technology using $350 commodity cards to begin with? High end Nvidia Quadros cost in the range of $4,000. This CUDA solution looks like it provides less impressive results and I don't think a video production company is going to sacrifice image quality to save a buck. If this were targeted toward Joe average consumer than I agree with you.
    - manvsmachine 17y ago
      I think you're somewhat misunderstanding the role that CUDA plays in all of this. You wouldn't need Quadros because the CUDA cards would only need to be responsible for performing the raytracing calculations, not actually rendering the image (unless you want it to). So they could have had 4xGTX295's, equivalent to 8 of the boards used in that presentation, just crunching numbers and then one workstation-class card to render textures, etc if they were concerned about render quality. If someone was still concerned about using GeForce cards, Tesla C1060's still cost only about $1K a board IIRC, and I think they'd be way faster at this sort of thing than the GTX285 used.

38 points by jawngee 17y ago

This seems somewhat less impressive that the raytraced Quake 3 from a few years ago, which has a higher framerate, less on-screen artifacts, and is also a well known application. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNZt3yDXno http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpNZt3yDXno

jawngee 17y ago
Except this demo isn't rendered on a farm like the quake demo is, plus does caustics, global illumination and is more suitable for professional application than the quake demo is.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

trapper 17y ago

I'm surprised this field hasn't moved forward as much as I thought. If memory serves me correctly, I remember being shown a cuda based real time ray tracer, with similar limitations by a masters student in early 2007. They ran into lot's of troubles because of the architecture of cuda itself (e.g. maximum occupancy was never very high on average), but could produce stunning realtime visuals at low framerate (e.g. 640x480). Not different from these guys at all. At higher resolutions it was much, much harder as the solutions didn't scale because of the limitations of cuda. I expected to see him presenting his stuff at siggraph but never did - not sure what happened to him, and an internet search reveals nothing.

pmorici 17y ago

Not really that impressive, esp. compared to the product offered by Caustic graphics that has been posted here before, http://www.caustic.com/ http://www.caustic.com/ they do realtime ray tracing with a piece of hard ware a kin to a graphics card that fits in a desktop.

manvsmachine 17y ago
Except that the total cost of investment is a $350 piece of commodity hardware and a free/open SDK. If it's not fast enough, just throw in more / faster cards. Using Caustic's platform means putting min. $4K into a unproven proprietary platform. If performance/price didn't matter, you might as well say "Not that impressive, considering you can just build a render farm". No disrepect to Caustic, but I could easily see them going the way of Ageia if they're not careful.
- pmorici 17y ago
  I see your point but is the target audience for this technology using $350 commodity cards to begin with? High end Nvidia Quadros cost in the range of $4,000. This CUDA solution looks like it provides less impressive results and I don't think a video production company is going to sacrifice image quality to save a buck. If this were targeted toward Joe average consumer than I agree with you.
  - manvsmachine 17y ago
    I think you're somewhat misunderstanding the role that CUDA plays in all of this. You wouldn't need Quadros because the CUDA cards would only need to be responsible for performing the raytracing calculations, not actually rendering the image (unless you want it to). So they could have had 4xGTX295's, equivalent to 8 of the boards used in that presentation, just crunching numbers and then one workstation-class card to render textures, etc if they were concerned about render quality. If someone was still concerned about using GeForce cards, Tesla C1060's still cost only about $1K a board IIRC, and I think they'd be way faster at this sort of thing than the GTX285 used.