Raytracing in Quake Wars?!?

(Fluffy_gIMp) #1

An interesting little movie here about some of the work Intel have been doing:

http://www.pcghx.com/aid,646920/News…ed_Quake_Wars/

(Ragnar_40k) #2

http://splashdamage.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15295 :smiley:

PS: Where is part 2 of the video!?

(ailmanki) #3

I wonder how long it will take until real workers are hired to build virtual stuff

(kamikazee) #4

It’s nice and all the more props to the Intel guys if it’s real-time, but… it’s non-functional eye-candy.

Also, does the helicopter create extra water riples?

(carnage) #5

I have seen some similar videos for quake 4 and although they claimed to be real time they were running on 8 core systems. Hardware a bit beyond your average gamer

But ray tracing does have some instances where it is better than rasterisation and the two techniques are not exclusive. Its conceivable that a hybrid approach could be used where rasterisation replaces the first ray stage and then secondary rays are used to simulate advanced reflection and refractions in special materials e.g. chrome, glass, water etc

of course for that to happen graphics cards are probably going to have to adopt some kind of support for accelerating ray tracing. And research with games like quake4 and ETQW brings us closer to that posibility

With all that said in most conventional games I find it hard to believe that ray tracing would offer significant advantages over quicker approximating techniques such as using an environment map.
http://www.idfun.de/temp/q4rt/
If you look at the top image on that page the actual reflection on that monster is so distorted that you could argue that realistically simulating it is a waste of processing power since the player cant appreciate the effect. In a perfect world it would be nice but in a realistic game environment you have to consider it that processing power would be better spent elsewhere

Another hurdle for ray tracing that its very dependant on knowing what the closest triangle is on the path of a ray and is troubled greatly by overlapping triangles. Modern games bypass the need for this by using a depth buffer. This is not sufficient for ray tracing and calculating the closest triangle quickly becomes very hard when in a dynamic environment AKA a game.