# NVIDIA Demonstrates Real-time Interactive Ray-tracing



## btarunr (Aug 18, 2008)

Ray-tracing is the buzzword with consumer and professional graphics these days. It's a technique with which accurate representation of light with its behaviour in adherence with the laws of physics can be done when generating 3D computer graphics. 

NVIDIA took ray-tracing to an interactive level with its work on an interactive real-time ray-tracing application. Currently NVIDIA has a larger stash of intellectual property in the field of ray-tracing than other players such as AMD or Intel, with the acquisition of MentalRay, a company that is pretty-much a standard in Hollywood.





At the Siggraph 2008 event, NVIDIA demonstrated a fully interactive GPU-based ray-tracer, which featured real-time ray-tracing in 30 frames/second (fps) and a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The demo saw NVIDIA flex its muscle with using almost every element in ray-tracing for which technology has been developed so far, namely a two-million polygon demo, an image-based paint shader, ray traced shadows, reflections and refractions.

To maintain those 30 fps at a high display resolution, NVIDIA used four Quadro FX 5800 graphics cards working in tandem. These next-gen Quadro boards are based on GT200(b) GPUs, come with 240 shader processors and 4 GB of GDDR3 memory (for a total of 960 shaders and 16 GB of GDDR3 memory). 





*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


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## MilkyWay (Aug 18, 2008)

it dosnt look all that great i think

i think it looks like an old 1998 game cut scene

for me at least untill they can get the detail to the level of the wine glasses picture then ill be happy right now it looks worse than current graphics


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## AddSub (Aug 18, 2008)

Yeah, dosen't look too special. I don't think ray-tracing will make that much of an impact in the gaming industry as they (Intel, nVidia) think it will. Anyone remember voxels and voxel rendering engines? It never really caught on.

Also, pretty obvious why nVidia did this demo. Kind of a "We can do it too!" type of message to Intel, their shareholders, and masses in general.


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## oli_ramsay (Aug 18, 2008)

btarunr said:


> To maintain those 30 fps at a high display resolution, NVIDIA used four Quadro FX 5800 graphics cards working in tandem. These next-gen Quadro boards are based on GT200(b) GPUs, come with 240 shader processors and 4 GB of GDDR3 memory (for a total of 960 shaders and 16 GB of GDDR3 memory).



wow, takes 960 shaders, and 16GB of video memory for a mere 30fps.  I sure hope they optimise it a hell of a lot more before they use this in games otherwise you'll need a NASA supercomputer to maintain 60fps at 800x600.


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## aquariuz (Aug 18, 2008)

MilkyWay said:


> it dosnt look all that great i think
> 
> i think it looks like an old 1998 game cut scene
> 
> for me at least untill they can get the detail to the level of the wine glasses picture then ill be happy right now it looks worse than current graphics



I dont think u get the point of it though. If u pay attention to the lighting detail, shadows n reflection clarity, u can well see wat they're trying to show with ray-tracing. It is no where close to an old 1998 game cut scene. If anything it looks like GRID beefed up. The only thing lacking is obviously the details on the surroundings, like the poles n buildings, which makes the whole image kinda dull.

Just imagine wat games will look like when they get ray-tracing perfect. but wat im thinking is wat it will take to make it happen for us if it takes them 4 Quadro FX to maintain just 30fps? 16gb, dat means 8 4870X2? lol


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## btarunr (Aug 18, 2008)

oli_ramsay said:


> wow, takes 960 shaders, and 16GB of video memory for a mere 30fps.  I sure hope they optimise it a hell of a lot more before they use this in games otherwise you'll need a NASA supercomputer to maintain 60fps at 800x600.



It's an interactive demo, people who come to the booth should be able to check its interactive authenticity (and not something that's pre-rendered). Other companies including companies that work for production-houses in Hollywood use huge server farms to do the same, all for 24 fps of realistic graphics for movies.


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## mlupple (Aug 18, 2008)

btarunr said:


> It's an interactive demo, people who come to the booth should be able to check its interactive authenticity (and not something that's pre-rendered). Other companies including companies that work for production-houses in Hollywood use huge server farms to do the same, all for 24 fps of realistic graphics for movies.


You don't seem to understand the issue we have with this.  It's getting only 30 FPS and doesn't even look as good as games do these days.  Take GTA for the PS3 for example.  That game looks better than this and is getting 30 FPS using a the PS3's weak GPU.  It's not about Hollywood's render farms.


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## btarunr (Aug 18, 2008)

mlupple said:


> You don't seem to understand the issue we have with this.  It's getting only 30 FPS and doesn't even look as good as games do these days.  Take GTA for the PS3 for example.  That game looks better than this and is getting 30 FPS using a the PS3's weak GPU.  It's not about Hollywood's render farms.



Well the last time AMD came out with something like this, they didn't give us a clue about the hardware they used, so at this point you can't call "NVIDIA used so much for just 30 fps" when you don't quite know what everyone else used.


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## Megasty (Aug 18, 2008)

I think its just under represented by the images. That is literally a ton of graphical power. Ray-tracing is still in its infancy so I didn't expect too much in terms of real-time action.


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## mrw1986 (Aug 18, 2008)

AMD's looked better.


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## magibeg (Aug 18, 2008)

mlupple said:


> You don't seem to understand the issue we have with this.  It's getting only 30 FPS and doesn't even look as good as games do these days.  Take GTA for the PS3 for example.  That game looks better than this and is getting 30 FPS using a the PS3's weak GPU.  It's not about Hollywood's render farms.



I don't think you quite understand what you're supposed to be looking at in the demo. Its more or less extremely accurate lighting/shadows/reflections. I'm pretty confident that ray tracing will eventually be the way of the future (maybe in another 8 years or so). Wouldn't be surprised if the next-gen consoles try to implement some sort of ray tracing. Also i feel ray tracing is one of those things thats best seen in a video so you can really see how lighting and shadows interact with the environment.


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## substance90 (Aug 18, 2008)

The REFLECTIONS, guys, watch the reflections! It`s about a ray-tracer, remember? Don`t look at the other sh*t.


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## mdm-adph (Aug 18, 2008)

substance90 said:


> The REFLECTIONS, guys, watch the reflections! It`s about a ray-tracer, remember? Don`t look at the other sh*t.



A lot of people don't understand what's so special about ray-tracing.  They'll constantly be spouting off with "I don't get it -- it looks like crap" right up until the day when we're all jacking into the matrix. :shadedshu


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## donmarkoni (Aug 18, 2008)

*U really don't get!*

After all this said, many people still miss the point.
If there is someone older on this forum, try to remember what was needed for 30 seconds of ray-traced animation 15-16 years ago...
I remember.
It took *FOUR* Silicon Graphics workstations rendering *TWO WEEKS*!
It is now done in real time.
So... It IS impressive! At least for me.


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## Easy Rhino (Aug 18, 2008)

is there a link to any sort of video of this demo?


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## newtekie1 (Aug 18, 2008)

mlupple said:


> You don't seem to understand the issue we have with this.  It's getting only 30 FPS and doesn't even look as good as games do these days.  Take GTA for the PS3 for example.  That game looks better than this and is getting 30 FPS using a the PS3's weak GPU.  It's not about Hollywood's render farms.



The pictures do not do Ray Tracing justice.  If you just look at a still image, it will not look that great.  You have to look closely at the detail.  The realistic reflections on the car's paint for instance.  The realistic shadows cast by everything.  I think if they showed a demo set at night, with all the lights reflecting and throwing shadows, then it would really show the beauty of Ray-tracing.

And GTA4 does not look better than this, I have yet to see a single reflection in GTA4, and the shadows look like complete ass.

And as for the power needed, yes, it is insane, and no where near reasonable.  But the technology is still very young.

You know, HDR came into the world in a very similar way.  It used to take a workstation with several graphics cards in it to render HDR, now we don't even think about it, it just happens.


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## btarunr (Aug 18, 2008)

Yes, here is the awesome: look at the orange road stripe being reflected even on the alloy wheels (something that has tons of polygons and is moving).


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## pbmaster (Aug 18, 2008)

Yes, exactly. Saying something looks like crap while still-captured when it's meant to be viewed in motion isn't justifiable. If you actually look, EVERYTHING is reflected and EVERY shadow is accurately depicted.


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## Nothgrin (Aug 18, 2008)

Some of you don't quite understand the look of ray tracing. I would advise you to go to wikipedia and look at the pictures. Those are probably prerendered through Maya or 3D Studio Max but imagine those images in real time and then you should get a better picture. Also you might want to note that thats 2 MILLION polygons. Most games don't even run that many. Take WoW for example, I would say at most theres 5-10K polygons on the screen at any one time. They use something called LOD(Level of Detail) as you move away from an object they reduce the polygon count on the model to save render time. What most games do to make them look more realistic is prerenedered shading. Thats a layer of normals that project from the model and the lighting is prebuilt into the model. This is shown in games such as Doom 3. 

Before ray-tracing has been done pre-rendered because of the massive amounts of calculations involved but to see that it can be done in 30fps is just amazing. Supposedly DX11 is going to support ray tracing in HAL.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 18, 2008)

Everything they have said about lighting/shadow/reflections clarity and accuracy apart. You have to take into account the polygon number on screen. How many games have you played with sustained 2 million polys? I'll tell you, NONE, not even close to that mark. You know when Crysis starts to lag because all the explsions and things flying? That's 1 million polys.

And that is a tech demo, the goal was not to make a pretty image. It was for the people who can understand what 30 fps @1920x1200 in a 2 million poly scene means.


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## newtekie1 (Aug 18, 2008)

btarunr said:


> Yes, here is the awesome: look at the orange road stripe being reflected even on the alloy wheels (something that has tons of polygons and is moving).



Not only that, but something that is curved.  Up until now, doing reflections, especially realistic ones, on curved objects was next to impossible in real time.  I have a feeling that is one of the reasons they picked that car to do the demo with actually, there isn't a flat surface on it, that and the car is bad ass.

Also, you have to realize the images presented here ar 800x450, the demo was done at 1900x1080.  There is a huge loss of quality just from the scaling of the images.


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## Megasty (Aug 18, 2008)

I for one would love to see that demo. But anything on the web would reduce the quality 10 fold which just sucks. Go into any kind of current racing game like grid or nfsps and see if you get all those pure reflections. Even with the games completely maxed out on a 30" lcd don't even come close.


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## KainXS (Aug 18, 2008)

this should give ray tracing a nice boost since now ati and nvidia gpu's can do it now


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## DarkMatter (Aug 18, 2008)

The bad thing is that ray-tracing is out of DX11 no?


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## PCpraiser100 (Aug 18, 2008)

The Ray-Tracing is overkill, I rather stick with more scaled shaders and textures like Cinema 2.0. Nvidia probably demonstrated this so some consumers can take their eyes off of the Cinema 2.0 articles. Ray-tracing is good, but i still think that Cinema 2.0 is better. I'm not saying that it looks unrealistic, I'm saying that when compared to texture-mapping its way out of the developer's league. Its still pretty cool, just don't wanna spend 40 Gs to get the setup to play it lol.


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## DrPepper (Aug 18, 2008)

We're getting close to "real" graphics after ray tracing  I like graphics the way they are now.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 18, 2008)

DrPepper said:


> We're getting close to "real" graphics after ray tracing  I like graphics the way they are now.



Are you saying you don't want more realistic graphics?

If so... WOW I never thought I would hear something like that.


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## Darkrealms (Aug 18, 2008)

Thats pretty impressive.  Granted it took a ton of hardware but still.





DarkMatter said:


> Are you saying you don't want more realistic graphics?
> 
> If so... WOW I never thought I would hear something like that.


I think some people like the idea of animation.  I don't in FPS but do MMOs.  Its a give and take I think.


donmarkoni said:


> After all this said, many people still miss the point.
> If there is someone older on this forum, try to remember what was needed for 30 seconds of ray-traced animation 15-16 years ago...
> I remember.
> It took *FOUR* Silicon Graphics workstations rendering *TWO WEEKS*!
> ...


Most people don't understand that : (
Ofcourse there are also many that don't remember as far back as 3dfx either : (


newtekie1 said:


> You know, HDR came into the world in a very similar way.  It used to take a workstation with several graphics cards in it to render HDR, now we don't even think about it, it just happens.


Nice example.


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## PrudentPrincess (Aug 18, 2008)

MilkyWay said:


> it dosnt look all that great i think
> 
> i think it looks like an old 1998 game cut scene
> 
> for me at least untill they can get the detail to the level of the wine glasses picture then ill be happy right now it looks worse than current graphics



You should really read about what this demo is for before bashing the graphics. And model of the car could be done in simple polygons, it doesn't matter. This was a demo of raytracing, not other visual effects.


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## ShinyG (Aug 18, 2008)

As a game artist pro, I can tell you ray-tracing is useless now for games.
It might be something to be used in the future, but as long as programmers can "fool"  the player into thinking the image looks "real" using less resources than described here, they won't give a rat's ass about ray-tracing...
The real advantage is in render farms for movies and stuff, where studios will be able to render entire movies in a fraction of the time. nVidia has one step ahead if it manages to make mentalRay a hardware rendering engine, but Intel's Larabee X86 basis might mean that all software rendering engines will get a significant performance boost. AMD is probably working on something similar with their Cinema 2.0 initiative also. 
So the competition is getting fierce in this area too, that could mean real-time ray-traycing for games might come sooner after all


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## DrPepper (Aug 18, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> Are you saying you don't want more realistic graphics?
> 
> If so... WOW I never thought I would hear something like that.



Well what fun will a game be if it is real life I mean that will get fricken boring after a while. The point of a game is to be fantasy. I do like better graphics just not "real" apart from flight simulators and RTS.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 18, 2008)

DrPepper said:


> Well what fun will a game be if it is real life I mean that will get fricken boring after a while. The point of a game is to be fantasy. I do like better graphics just not "real" apart from flight simulators and RTS.



Well as Darkrealms pointed out, we have a different view of what the point of a game is. I like gaming to do things that I could not do in real life and I want them to be as believable as possible.

But besides that I think you are missinterpreting the realism I was talking about. The one that ray-tracing will bring on. The better example I can put here is Shrek. Shrek 3, is the last one I think, and it's very advanced in terms of the realism of lighting/shadowing and the shaders used. But you have to agree that because of that the fantasy feeling is not gone. Team Fortress 2 is just another example. Technologically is the most advanced Source game and in that way the most realistic one, yet it has that unique cartoonish feeling. One thing does not negate the other one IMO.


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## PCpraiser100 (Aug 18, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> Well as Darkrealms pointed out, we have a different view of what the point of a game is. I like gaming to do things that I could not do in real life and I want them to be as believable as possible.
> 
> 
> But besides that I think you are missinterpreting the realism I was talking about. The one that ray-tracing will bring on. The better example I can put here is Shrek. Shrek 3, is the last one I think, and it's very advanced in terms of the realism of lighting/shadowing and the shaders used. But you have to agree that because of that the fantasy feeling is not gone. Team Fortress 2 is just another example. Technologically is the most advanced Source game and in that way the most realistic one, yet it has that unique cartoonish feeling. One thing does not negate the other one IMO.



If graphics like this gets popular, little kids will be too scared to go on the computer to play Peggle lol.

If ray-tracing is in possession to the devs, this could be a democracy for the console players. I barely notice the textures and crap if I am extremely focussed on the gameplay. If I really care about realism, I can the crap out of Crysis and go play Half-Life 2. Valve became a 70M dollar company this way, as they took the next generation of graphics and replaced them with stereotypes, making casual players spontaneously combust at a smaller packaged game. Ray-tracing was replaced mostly in the first Source engines with semi-triggered texture-mapping that instantly changed into a different texture pattern to mimic ray-tracing without the performance regrets, which came into play if you had the option to ignite fire-traps in the game. As for lighting, dynamic lighting was replaced with HDR-rendering, which had optimization tricks up its sleeve. HDR light entrails from crescent windows were just transparent 3D texture-tubing effects compared to dynamic lighting with a mixture of shadow and atmospheric effects. As for the blooming, that was the only performance remark that Source really had, since the blooming was mirrored by the water detail, which was one of the only ray-tracing effect in the Source engine. In 2007, dynamic shadow effects was introduced to Source, which was another ray-tracing effect that was supposed to scale more with the NPCs, which were one of the only things in the game to have 100% reactive shaders. So thats all I wanted to say, to tell you that this is good enough for me.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 18, 2008)

PCpraiser100 said:


> If graphics like this gets popular, little kids will be too scared to go on the computer to play Peggle lol.



It already is scary. 

But no, seriously. I laugh every time I hear parents complain about the "realism" of the games their kids are playing. Like what happened with COD4. Your kid shouldn't be playing that game to begin with.

EDIT: We have different views. I like realism. I will tell you when it's going to be enough for me . When I am able to see an enemy around the corner reflected in the helmet or the fallen golden Desert Eagle of an enemy I just shot down, then it's going to be enough for me. 

Nah, I lied that would probably be not enough yet.


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## Darkrealms (Aug 18, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> It already is scary.
> 
> But no, seriously. I laugh every time I hear parents complain about the "realism" of the games their kids are playing. Like what happened with COD4. Your kid shouldn't be playing that game to begin with.


I agree with that!  If a parent needs to be complaining about it . . . Why is the kid playing it??


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## DrPepper (Aug 18, 2008)

Darkrealms said:


> I agree with that!  If a parent needs to be complaining about it . . . Why is the kid playing it??



damn right my lil bro was playing gta:sa at 5 and he is now an ... idiot but thats my fault (flying xbox controllers) 

I meant that I don't want games to get so graphically realistic that I might as well play the pc than look outside, Well it will be damn better looking than my street albeit but I love the cartoonish graphics of crysis and team fortress 2 (don't say crysis isn't cartoonish) it is in a less humerous and exuberant way but games like cod4 are trying to be realistic which is cool but takes out the fun.


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## PCpraiser100 (Aug 18, 2008)

DrPepper said:


> damn right my lil bro was playing gta:sa at 5 and he is now an ... idiot but thats my fault (flying xbox controllers)



I don't really like console gamers, they ask for too much and they are the ones who down-spiraled PC compatibility to burning hell due to consumers speaking out for their 1080p TVs. Just looking at console gamers makes me wanna start a convention to prevent idiotic gaming demands. I mean like watching games like GTA and Halo get rated and is console-exclusive makes me wanna throw my old Xbox out the window with fury and pain  Especially if the games are exclusive to consoles after spending thousands on a PC!!


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## PrudentPrincess (Aug 18, 2008)

DrPepper said:


> damn right my lil bro was playing gta:sa at 5 and he is now an ... idiot but thats my fault (flying xbox controllers)
> 
> I meant that I don't want games to get so graphically realistic that I might as well play the pc than look outside, Well it will be damn better looking than my street albeit but I love the cartoonish graphics of crysis and team fortress 2 (don't say crysis isn't cartoonish) it is in a less humerous and exuberant way but games like cod4 are trying to be realistic which is cool but takes out the fun.



Yeah, WoW ruins that theory because the graphics aren't up to par but it still keeps people from going outside...ever.


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## PCpraiser100 (Aug 18, 2008)

PrudentPrincess said:


> Yeah, WoW ruins that theory because the graphics aren't up to par but it still keeps people from going outside...ever.



 soooo true.


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## Megasty (Aug 18, 2008)

PrudentPrincess said:


> Yeah, WoW ruins that theory because the graphics aren't up to par but it still keeps people from going outside...ever.



WoW is a virus, for people & computers. I'm still trying to cure my nephew of it. He's still trying to find out who hacked his bot 

Its a prime example of what can happen if developers make a game that can last forever w/o any apparent ending or goal. Graphics can get better & better, but if the game has a ending then ppl will stop playing it at some point or another...


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## Darkrealms (Aug 18, 2008)

PrudentPrincess said:


> Yeah, WoW ruins that theory because the graphics aren't up to par but it still keeps people from going outside...ever.


Hey Blizzard makes sure that players go outside.  After my account was banned I've spent a lot of time outside.  I only twitch a little here and there...
Thats the thing about Blizzard though.  They want anything to be able to play their games.  You have to admit the graphics have improved quite a bit from what they started at in 2004.
_Did I just date myself . . ._


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## Valdez (Aug 18, 2008)

Ray tracing? And what? This looks like shit.

Check this:
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...nshots_and_video_of_the_new_Radeon_tech_demo/


I like this one much much better


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## PCpraiser100 (Aug 18, 2008)

Valdez said:


> Ray tracing? And what? This looks like shit.
> 
> Check this:
> http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...nshots_and_video_of_the_new_Radeon_tech_demo/
> ...



Thats Cinema 2.0, I already said that the shaders on the cars are waaaay better than this crappy demo.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 18, 2008)

Valdez said:


> Ray tracing? And what? This looks like shit.
> 
> Check this:
> http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...nshots_and_video_of_the_new_Radeon_tech_demo/
> ...



Yeah that Ati's one was very cool. That's the way I want to game in the near future. But the scope of that one and the one here are completely different, although they demostrate the same thing: real time ray-tracing is not so far away. 
First of all, the Ruby one was on 720p while this one is at 1920x1200. You need 2,5x more power to render at 1920x1200 than at 720p. 
Then I'm sure that the Ruby demo didn't have as much as 2 million polys. 
Also they did it as a showcase of how beautiful a ray-traced scene can get, rather than like a realtime tech demostration like this one. 
And finally but not least important, that demo was not interactive like this one. It makes a big difference.

All in all, both have demostrated they have a very valid real time ray-tracer and that is what matters.


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## EnergyFX (Aug 18, 2008)

Stop looking at the whole picture and focus on the reflections.  For example, in the second picture look at how the yellow line is reflected across the car with hyper accuracy.  Notice how it bends imperfectly across the front bumper and even the spokes of the wheel.  Look even closer at how it also bends imperfectly across the door and shifts as it transitions across the gap separating the door from the rear quarter panel.  I use the term 'imperfect' because that is exactly what reflections are supposed to be as opposed to current reflections that are actually too perfect to look realistic.

As for the hardware complaints.  Try to take a moment to wrap your brain around the tremendous processing power needed to perform the task of converting real-world lighting physics into a mathematical equation across an infinite number of surface variations and performing all of those calculations in real-time.  Now add on to this the additional processing requirements of the program itself (the game), the physics, the other graphics, the shading and texture, etc. etc. etc. and you might be able to understand why so much hardware was needed for this.

It's impressive when you look past your simple gamer mentality (which I admit I also did initially) of expecting max frames per second with gorgeous texture and particle effects and try to only focus on what the demonstration is showing off.


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## MilkyWay (Aug 19, 2008)

reflections if thats all it brings to the table for that amount of power im not impressed

when ray tracing becomes like that wineglass picture and runs on affordable hardware ill be impressed

it should be about the graphics as a whole not just lighting ect

Ruby 2.0 video someone posted is UBER, MUCH MORE IMPRESSIVE!!!


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## infrared (Aug 19, 2008)

This is very impressive. Think of how good CG in films is getting so far.. New software and rendering methods being developed all the time. Soon you won't be able to tell the diff between real and CG! And it'll take less time to complete the movies, with less expense.

Also, keep in mind the demo was @ 1920x1080 and the pics there are 800x500. I can guarantee you the original image would have looked a LOT better. Besides that, those whining about the "poor graphics" are missing the entire point of what this demo is about.


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## GSG-9 (Aug 19, 2008)

I give Nvidia Credit for telling us what it is running on and showing us What it does by itself. I think its important and shows credibility that they released a tech demo first that ONLY shows the use of raytracing. Now that they have shown that they should dazzle us with a demo implementing high resolution textures as well (as ATi did).

As said by others above, we have no idea what that ATi video is running on (3/4 x 4800x2's?). Its very pretty, but alot of it seems to be the depth of field/field of view/camera blur applied to the scene, (In the background) not the raytracing.



MilkyWay said:


> when ray tracing becomes like that wineglass picture and runs on affordable hardware ill be impressed
> 
> it should be about the graphics as a whole not just lighting ect
> 
> Ruby 2.0 video someone posted is UBER, MUCH MORE IMPRESSIVE!!!



Epic Fail. Thats what were saying. Ray tracing is like that. Everyone should know that. Thats not what Nvidia is showing off, there just showing they got the tracing down in real time. They can throw in all the stuff we ALREADY KNOW IS OUT THERE whenever they feel like it. Its not that hard to drop on a 2024x2068 texture over the damned car.
This is a TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH TECH Demo not a game. Keep focused on what its showing you.


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## Valdez (Aug 19, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> Yeah that Ati's one was very cool. That's the way I want to game in the near future. But the scope of that one and the one here are completely different, although they demostrate the same thing: real time ray-tracing is not so far away.
> First of all, the Ruby one was on 720p while this one is at 1920x1200. You need 2,5x more power to render at 1920x1200 than at 720p.



Thats true, but nv used 4 quadro fx 5800 4gb for this ray tracing demo @30fps. How much does it cost? 
Now the question is, how many rv770 needed for this ruby demo. 2, 3 or 4? Anyway it will cost much less.
Which one looks better? Definitely Ruby. 



DarkMatter said:


> Then I'm sure that the Ruby demo didn't have as much as 2 million polys.



Tesselation.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 19, 2008)

EnergyFX said:


> _Everything_



Very well put Energy.



Valdez said:


> Thats true, but nv used 4 quadro fx 5800 4gb for this ray tracing demo @30fps. How much does it cost?
> Now the question is, how many rv770 needed for this ruby demo. 2, 3 or 4? Anyway it will cost much less.
> Which one looks better? Definitely Ruby.
> 
> ...



OMG do people read others' posts. Look at the few ones above yours, they have said it all. Ruby one looks better because they made it to look better. This one is an *I-N-TE-R-A-C-T-I-V-E  T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y  D-E-M-O*. It's meant to show that 1920x1200 @ 30 fps can be done. Especially in ray-tracing textures don't matter as much as in rasterizers performance wise and same happens with many effects. This demo is lacking them because they were out of their scope, but they could add them with any significant performance penalty.

About the hardware, we don't know the one used by Ati, but those Quadros are nothing else than GTX cards. So in reality they just used 4 GTX280. Sure, they are more expensive than RV770 derivatives but not by that much and they are really doing a lot more work than on the Ruby demo.

And again, as many many many others have said it doesn't matter how it looks. What looks better real games or 3Dmark? 


Hint: 3Dmark is not interactive.

And about tesselation. Yeah they used tesselation and that is good, as it increases the detail level with minimal performnce penalty (compared to actual polyfons), but tesselation on the other hand very hardly adds details (and also very hardly can be animated), it just makes things smoother. And that's a very different thing. Nvidia demo demostrates that they can use 2 million of actual polygons that can be transformed and animated. The Ruby demo even if it had 10 million polys after the tesselation was applied doesn't mean anything special, as the 2 ones of the Nvidia demo are far more interesting from a real performance point of view.


----------



## PrudentPrincess (Aug 19, 2008)

Valdez said:


> Ray tracing? And what? This looks like shit.
> 
> Check this:
> http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,...nshots_and_video_of_the_new_Radeon_tech_demo/
> ...



Don't you guys get it? This is one of the first Nvidia demos of raytracing, and what you see is excatly what they wanted you to see. If they wanted to add nice shaders, shadows, HDR lighting they would, they're not stupid. This was a live demo. Their goal was obviously to make a playable example of raytracing, and because of the extreme amount of hardware it took they probably couldn't afford to add nice effects.


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## GSG-9 (Aug 19, 2008)

PrudentPrincess said:


> Don't you guys get it? This is one of the first Nvidia demos of raytracing, and what you see is excatly what they wanted you to see. If they wanted to add nice shaders, shadows, HDR lighting they would,



I would give up, if people are to stupid to check above to see where the conversation is before they post they deserve to be ignored.



PrudentPrincess said:


> they're not stupid. This was a live demo. Their goal was obviously to make a playable example of raytracing, and because of the extreme amount of hardware it took they probably couldn't afford to add nice effects.



I would not say that. I would say they did not even try to add nice textures. It was not the goal. I doubt they even tried to implement it. I think they could afford it, I just think they did not, texturing the car may have brought the frames down to 25 or something, that may not have been acceptable for them for a live demo, but to be honest I think they just did not implement it because they wanted it to be clear what ray tracing was on its own without any confusion on which lines were on the textures and which ones were being ray traced (for example the seam of the trunk on the car).

yesss. I used the the phrase I think 3 times above and I dont think anyone cares what I think.


----------



## Megasty (Aug 19, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> Very well put Energy.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Spelling it out for them won't help. They just think it looks like shit. They think 10K of cards should put out better. They also don't know anything about ray-tracing  This is definitely the future of gaming as well as movies. In 10 yrs, this shit will be blowing us all away


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## Darkrealms (Aug 19, 2008)

Megasty said:


> Spelling it out for them won't help. They just think it looks like shit. They think 10K of cards should put out better. They also don't know anything about ray-tracing  This is definitely the future of gaming as well as movies. In 10 yrs, this shit will be blowing us all away


LoL, don't say 10 years.  Ray-tracing will probably be old hat in 10 years.  After all when a video card comes with 10gb RAM Ray-tracing will be childs play.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 19, 2008)

Megasty said:


> Spelling it out for them won't help. They just think it looks like shit. They think 10K of cards should put out better. They also don't know anything about ray-tracing  This is definitely the future of gaming as well as movies. In 10 yrs, this shit will be blowing us all away



LOL You are so right. I should have learnt from what people said about Intel's ray-traced Quake.  

Also in the hardware department, I should have learnt from what some people said about UT3 Engine when one of the developers was asked about the graphics card he used to test it on and how it ran. He said a Quadro and decent fps. I can't remember which one, but I do remember the price of it at the time: $2000+, it was a 7900 with more RAM. Guess what people said.


----------



## Mussels (Aug 19, 2008)

overall theres a few things that i feel should be reapeated in this thread.

#1: it took 4 video cards to do this, instead of TONS OF COMPUTERS IN A SERVER FARM. Its a LOT faster now and possible on ONE machine, as opposed to lots.

#2: The reference to HDR. everyone disliked it at first too, and it was a performance killer. now its almost free and its tuned in the way people like it. Shadows in games are the same - now we're getting reflections. Imagine 100% perfect shadows added to your favourite game now.. remember its going to be ADDED into existing things, its not taking anything else away!

#3: it was INTERACTIVE. Thats a huge step from a simple non-interactive movie.

#4:  darkmatters post right above this one. the UT3 engine was developed on a $2,000 card... that was a 7900. Give it 2 years and this amount of power will be nothing! look at a GTX280 now compared to a 7900 back then


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## DarkMatter (Aug 19, 2008)

#5 Why the lack of nitty gritty textures and effects doesn't matter at all.

Although you need a bit of knowledge of what ray-tracing is to understand this point. I found this link "Ray-tracing for the masses" that explains how it works, for those who don't know and want to learn. 

http://www.cs.unc.edu/~rademach/xroads-RT/RTarticle.html

After reading it what you have to understand of the demo is this:

1- All the ray-tracing work (which involves reflection/refraction testing) is already done in this Nvidia demo. It's by far the most demanding task a ray-tracer must do.

2- At every surface found by the rays, a COLOR has already been picked through a texture load. Whether that texture is of good quality or not (or if it is modified by a shader) won't matter so much, the performance is almost the same as the task of fetching the textures already happened in the demo.

3- Many of the effects you can add are not as costly as the geometry surfaces. i.e. If you add fog, fog does not have reflection or it is usually small enough that would be a waste of resources to test it. That means that ray splitting has not to be done, it's just applying a transparency (with refraction, of course, this is ray-tracing after all ). 

Or blurring if you prefer, blurring in ray-tracing just means changing the direction of the rays, which is what actually happens in reality.


And that's it. That's why it doesn't matter if the demo looks pretty or not. It's quite an achievement and should be understood as it is. Hope this helps.


----------



## newtekie1 (Aug 19, 2008)

All the people bitching about how much hardware this demo required need to learn to read.  As I already said, HDR started out the same way.  It required huge amounts of hardware to pull of in real time, now a $50 card can do it.


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## KainXS (Aug 19, 2008)

sounds like your all bitching back and forth to me, lol

and over some pictures, , how do you "actually" know how much workload is actually on these cards

they can say its how many polygons they want but we should all know how these PR games usually play out


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## Hayder_Master (Aug 19, 2008)

maybe if we see some video can explain more than that picture's


----------



## tkpenalty (Aug 19, 2008)

This is a desperate attempt to counter AMD's refined example of ray tracing. Nvidia's example screams of being rushed.


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## btarunr (Aug 19, 2008)

Valdez said:


> Thats true, but nv used 4 quadro fx 5800 4gb for this ray tracing demo @30fps. How much does it cost?
> Now the question is, how many rv770 needed for this ruby demo. 2, 3 or 4? Anyway it will cost much less.
> Which one looks better? Definitely Ruby.



Link me to a site which says they used desktop Radeons for AMD's demo and not a farm.


----------



## kaneda (Aug 19, 2008)

btarunr said:


> Link me to a site which says they used desktop Radeons for AMD's demo and not a farm.



i was pretty sure i read something on the AMD website about it being rendered on two  workstation cards in crossfire.



also http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/


edit: direct from AMD( http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/AboutAMD/0,,51_52_15438_15106,00.html?redir=cin01 )

Rendered in real-time and interactive, this is a brief video from the first Cinema 2.0 demo, premiered by AMD in San Francisco on June 16, 2008. The interactive demo was rendered by a single PC equipped with two "RV770" codenamed graphics cards powered by an AMD Phenom™ X4 9850 Processor and AMD 790FX Chipset. The full demo shows cinema-quality digital images rendered in real-time with interactivity. Check back later this summer for a video of the full Ruby Cinema 2.0 demo


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## GSG-9 (Aug 19, 2008)

tkpenalty said:


> This is a desperate attempt to counter AMD's refined example of ray tracing. Nvidia's example screams of being rushed.




Refined example of ray tracing? you made me laugh out loud in real life. Its a fine example of computer graphics. They put so much eye candy in it people cant tell what the ray tracing is (its a full tech demo for Cinema 2.0 NOT. I repeat NOT for ray tracing alone.) Nvidia released a demo of RAY TRACING you think its a public response to AMDs demo? Thats funny...because it was not public. None of us have seen it, it was not for us.  It was a tech demo for people in the industry. And I can see why, half the people not in the industry are to stupid to see the point of the demo and did not deserve to know it exists as this thread demonstrates.





kaneda said:


> The interactive demo was rendered by a single PC equipped with two "RV770" codenamed graphics cards



2 4870x2's. 4 Cores. The same equivalent as 4 280's, a little less efficient but equivocal in my opinion.


----------



## rflair (Aug 19, 2008)

GSG-9 said:


> Refined example of ray tracing? you made me laugh out loud in real life. Its a fine example of computer graphics. They put so much eye candy in it people cant tell what the ray tracing is (its a full tech demo for Cinema 2.0 NOT. I repeat NOT for ray tracing alone.) Nvidia released a demo of RAY TRACING you think its a public response to AMDs demo? Thats funny...because it was not public. None of us have seen it, it was not for us.  It was a tech demo for people in the industry. And I can see why, half the people not in the industry are to stupid to see the point of the demo and did not deserve to know it exists as this thread demonstrates.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



From what I've seen of both the ATI demo is much better, the fact that it doing ray tracing and more just make it a better tech demo.

Are you propping up Nvidia's demo just because your a fanboy or something?  Because thats what your coming off as.

The reflections in the Nvidia demo are limited to the few colors used in its environment, there is a reason all the buildings are grey and few color on anything else.

The ATI demo is just more robust, even you can see that.

Still its good to see both companies moving forward with some very nice technology.


----------



## GSG-9 (Aug 19, 2008)

rflair said:


> From what I've seen of both the ATI demo is much better, the fact that it doing ray tracing and more just make it a better tech demo.
> 
> Are you propping up Nvidia's demo just because your a fanboy or something?  Because thats what your coming off as.



Are you an idiot? I have a 4870 in my rig. 



rflair said:


> The reflections in the Nvidia demo are limited to the few colors used in its environment, there is a reason all the buildings are grey and few color on anything else.



There are no other colors because its pure ray tracing! its taking everything from the environment! I have had to ray trace BY HAND with a calculator in AP physics. There are no other colors unless the ray passes through another medium (Glass, Water, Fog, etc.) which bends it (the ray) towards or away from the normal (90 degrees) (changing the frequency/wavelength of the ray) which in turn changes the color that is seen. Your bitching about them not picking colors you liked for the tech demo that was not intended for customers, but members of the industry to see? you sound very ignorant. Are you under the impression that if they had used more colors it would have been harder for the scene to be processed? If thats the case I will ease your mind. It would render just as fast.




rflair said:


> The ATI demo is just more robust, even you can see that.
> 
> Still its good to see both companies moving forward with some very nice technology.


YES. Its a full tech demo for Cinema 2.0. And it was a public demo. For us they have the video online, its public. Nvidia is not showcasing a new technology suite, there just f****** showing raytracing in real time.  They could do more, but that was not the goal. and you were not supposed to even see this much. Period.

You might want to read some before you jump in to a thread like this.


----------



## rflair (Aug 19, 2008)

GSG-9 said:


> Are you an idiot? I have a 4870 in my rig.
> 
> 
> 
> Opps


----------



## rflair (Aug 19, 2008)

GSG-9 said:


> Are you an idiot? I have a 4870 in my rig.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



The only person sounding ignorant and directly calling other people stupid and an idiot is you.  Must be nice from behind your keyboard, believe me it wouldn't be so nice face to face.

People are allowed their opinions and should not have to deal with ass hat responses from a dweeb hiding behind his PC.

Answer things with respect to others, knowledge is a good thing to share but you aren't coming off as knowledgeable just everything you've accused others of being.

And I could debate the entire light and the way it reflects and is handle in true environments and that Nvidia did a very, very simple demo but you have proved that your not up to that.


----------



## Valdez (Aug 19, 2008)

GSG-9 said:


> 2 4870x2's. 4 Cores. The same equivalent as 4 280's, a little less efficient but equivocal in my opinion.



Two rv770 means two 4850 or two 4870 or one 4870x2. 
The 4870x2's codename is r700 not rv770.


----------



## Mussels (Aug 19, 2008)

GSG9's point is simple: Nvidias demo was PURE ray tracing, while ATI's is ray tracing with extras added on top.

Of course ATI's will look better - its DESIGNED to. Nvidias was PURELY ray tracing.

Its like saying HDR is crap simply because in the earliest of tests, they didnt include any other shader effects to go along with it - it was plain and boring. Duh, its early stages - they can leave out whatever they want for tech demos as its about the TECH, NOT about 'looking good'


----------



## Valdez (Aug 19, 2008)

Mussels said:


> GSG9's point is simple: Nvidias demo was PURE ray tracing, while ATI's is ray tracing with extras added on top.
> 
> Of course ATI's will look better - its DESIGNED to. Nvidias was PURELY ray tracing.



Summary:

Nvidia: 30fps in raytracing without extras with four uberexpensive 4gb cards.
Ati: 25+fps in raytracing + extras with two cheap cards.

Am i correct?


----------



## GSG-9 (Aug 19, 2008)

rflair said:


> The only person sounding ignorant and directly calling other people stupid and an idiot is you.  Must be nice from behind your keyboard, believe me it wouldn't be so nice face to face.
> 
> People are allowed their opinions and should not have to deal with ass hat responses from a dweeb hiding behind his PC.
> 
> Answer things with respect to others, knowledge is a good thing to share but you aren't coming of as knowledgeable just everything you've accused others of being.




Don't insult me in the first post directed at me and you might earn my respect, if you had not noticed I did not insult Tk or anyone else just the guy who stepped in, used some loaded words and acted with a god complex. Did you see me make any comments about the ATi demo besides that it was run on 4 cores? No. Thats not what this thread is about its about  _NVIDIA_ Demonstrating *Real-time* Interactive Ray-tracing
Hmm, so possibly, when I speak about the topic at hand...in a thread about the topic, its no more bios than that I am on topic hmm?
I do like ray tracing, it is how our eyes create the environment we see. It IS the future of rendering. That is something people need to understand. I would like them to understand that Nvidia was trying to show Ray Tracing and that was the only thing, hence the scene was not painted with effects. But if people dont get it to bad.


People can have all the opinions they want and they can post them as much as they want. Including saying anything they want about the aesthetics of this demo.

Im sure as hell not getting into a pissing match with you. If you want to delve into what you think of me by all means continue, you will piss off a moderator pretty quick pulling the thread off topic. Which sounds like a good idea before you get to your 20th post. This would be a good time to shut up or interject something useful into the thread.



Valdez said:


> Two rv770 means two 4850 or two 4870 or one 4870x2.
> The 4870x2's codename is r700 not rv770.



That is more impressive I must say, I was under the impression the rv770 was the x2 card. I do wonder if havok has anything to do with ATi's ray tracing...



Mussels said:


> GSG9's point is simple: Nvidias demo was PURE ray tracing, while ATI's is ray tracing with extras added on top.
> 
> Of course ATI's will look better - its DESIGNED to. Nvidias was PURELY ray tracing.
> 
> Its like saying HDR is crap simply because in the earliest of tests, they didnt include any other shader effects to go along with it - it was plain and boring. Duh, its early stages - they can leave out whatever they want for tech demos as its about the TECH, NOT about 'looking good'



You just made me feel allot better, I have felt like im talking to a brick wall today and yesterday with different people posting the same things redundantly that have already been covered in various threads and then the same responses follow...I'm glad someone knew what I meant.


----------



## DrPepper (Aug 19, 2008)

Valdez said:


> Summary:
> 
> Nvidia: 30fps in raytracing without extras with four uberexpensive 4gb cards.
> Ati: 25+fps in raytracing + extras with two cheap cards.
> ...



Who said they were cheap  Could have been RV770 workstation cards. If you look back at the earliest physics models they were rather bare and blocky and now compared to physics models that are being touted.


----------



## PCpraiser100 (Aug 19, 2008)

DrPepper said:


> Who said they were cheap  Could have been RV770 workstation cards. If you look back at the earliest physics models they were rather bare and blocky and now compared to physics models that are being touted.



My friend's dad who works for AMD told me on the phone last night that the basic components used to play/develop the Cinema 2.0 demo was the V5700 on a 9950 BE Phenom with 4GB of DDR2 RAM, no OC was in the process. I see a more compatible approach compared to enough computer workstation power to diagnose a space station...


----------



## DarkMatter (Aug 19, 2008)

Give up guys. If they can't understand my last post, they will not understand why it doesn't matter that the Ati one looks better.



rflair said:


> The reflections in the Nvidia demo are limited to the few colors used in its environment, there is a reason all the buildings are grey and few color on anything else.



Don't want to insult you, but this just shows your limited knowlegde. For the 2 billio0nth time, this is a tech demo. Ray-tracing in a glance does this: find a surface (polygon), calculate the amount of light reflected/refracted, extract* the color of that position in the poly, move on to the next surface.

*It doesn't matter if that texture is a beatiful high detailed one or a completely grey one. In both cases the operation "LOAD_TEX (x,y)" or whatever the name it has, DOES occur. The "performance hit" is the same in both cases. Understand this for once before continuing with the nonsense and the acusations FFS.

Another thing to consider BEFORE talking about the hardware used is that this demo was at 1920x1200 while the other one was on 720p. And forget about resolution scalability of raster renderers, ray-tracing is 100% dependant on resolution. You can't compare both demos because they are very different, and both are as impressive. In a manner, this one is even more impressive, as I remember reading that Ati couldn't achieve such high resolutions no matter how much hardware they used.

And finally, YES, Ati hardware NOW is a lot better suited for ray-tracing becuse it has tons of shaders and a tesselator. Yet it can't do ray-tracing on a level it would be useful for games. This is a ray-tracing demo, not a demo to see which hardware can run it. Whenever the renderer software is prepared, hardware capable of running it will be released. Or do you honestly believe Nvidia is stupid or that they can't put as many shaders as Ati on one chip? When ray-tracing is mature enough Ati, Intel and Nvidia will all have their capable hardware, don't worry.


----------



## GSG-9 (Aug 19, 2008)

PCpraiser100 said:


> My friend's dad who works for AMD told me on the phone last night that the basic components used to play the Cinema 2.0 demo was the V5700 on a 9950 BE Phenom with 4GB of DDR2 RAM, no OC was in the process. I see a more compatible approach compared to enough computer workstation power to overclock a space station...



lol I had to look up the V5700 
I guess that makes since, it was a tech demo so it would make since that they used 2 workstation cards vs. a Hd series card.




DarkMatter said:


> Another thing to consider BEFORE talking about the hardware used is that this demo was at 1920x1200 while the other one was on 720p. And forget about resolution scalability of raster renderers, ray-tracing is 100% dependant on resolution. You can't compare both demos because they are very different, and both are as impressive. In a manner, this one is even more impressive, as I remember reading that Ati couldn't achieve such high resolutions no matter how much hardware they used.



Very Very true, my monitor looks better at 1680x1050 than 1920x1200 anyway. +1 for me  (and 10%+ Performance increase)


----------



## rflair (Aug 19, 2008)

@ GSG-9

What I was saying from my first post was that there is a reason the Nvidia ray trace demo use an all grey environment, its easier to calculate just one color and its gradient shades being reflected, after all the only thing showcasing ray tracing is the car itself, the environment is not showing any and in one of the pics where the car appears to be near the glass of the building ray tracing should be happening to the glass.

Nvidia's ray tracing demo isn't truly environmental it specific to the car.

Ati's demo is just a better demo of ray tracing, the environment and all objects have ray tracing, plus color and nice textures.


----------



## Valdez (Aug 19, 2008)

PCpraiser100 said:


> My friend's dad who works for AMD told me on the phone last night that the basic components used to play/develop the Cinema 2.0 demo was the V5700 on a 9950 BE Phenom with 4GB of DDR2 RAM, no OC was in the process. I see a more compatible approach compared to enough computer workstation power to diagnose a space station...



Lol, you say this demo was presented on two 128-bit hd3800 (codenamed rv670)? 







Sorry, v5700 based on rv730, not rv670. Anyway its less powerful than a hd3850/3870.


----------



## DarkMatter (Aug 19, 2008)

rflair said:


> @ GSG-9
> 
> What I was saying from my first post was that there is a reason the Nvidia ray trace demo use an all grey environment, *its easier to calculate just one color and its gradient shades being reflected*, after all the only thing showcasing ray tracing is the car itself, the environment is not showing any and in one of the pics where the car appears to be near the glass of the building *ray tracing should be happening to the glass*.
> 
> ...



FALSE and IT DOES.

http://www.techreport.com/image.x/2...me_raytracing_at_Siggraph/NVIDIA_RT_demo1.jpg

Not only that, but if you look enough on the image you will see that the building is reflected in the reflection of the card being reflected in the building glass. That is at least 3 bounces. And that's another thing we don't know and we shouldn't be talking about performance without that data. Nvidia could be calculating up to 10 bounces while Ati only one or two. The thing is we don't know a shit...

All that I can say is search a bit, learn a bit.


----------



## rflair (Aug 19, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> Give up guys. If they can't understand my last post, they will not understand why it doesn't matter that the Ati one looks better.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



So what you are saying is that a true environment which has multiple colors and light being refracted from many angles and effecting the surfaces it ends up on is the same as  flat grey objects doing the same?


----------



## rflair (Aug 19, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> FALSE and IT DOES.
> 
> http://www.techreport.com/image.x/2...me_raytracing_at_Siggraph/NVIDIA_RT_demo1.jpg
> 
> ...



Dang never saw that pic, much better view and perspective of what is happening.

Yes and you are right, we don't know enough about either demo.


----------



## DarkMatter (Aug 19, 2008)

rflair said:


> So what you are saying is that a true environment which has multiple colors and light being refracted from many angles and effecting the surfaces it ends up on is the same as  flat grey objects doing the same?



Indeed. And not only that, but ray-tracing reflection/refraction tests occur on all surfaces and not only on reflective ones. Ray-tracing is a physically correct rendering method. This means it calculates the incidence of light on the surfaces and based on the reflection/refraction indexes it will reflect/refract or not. Not reflective surfaces don't reflect light because it's reflection index is 0, but the same calculation does occur as if it was reflective. The only difference is that the ray won't continue bouncing (won't be reflected) nor it will be splitted, as would be the case on a reflective AND refractive surface, such as glass.

 Splitted does not exist is just split isn't it?


----------



## rflair (Aug 19, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> Indeed. And not only that, but ray-tracing reflection/refraction tests occur on all surfaces and not only on reflective ones. Ray-tracing is a physically correct rendering method. This means it calculates the incidence of light on the surfaces and based on the reflection/refraction indexes it will reflect/refract or not. Not reflective surfaces don't reflect light because it's reflection index is 0, but the same calculation does occur as if it was reflective. The only difference is that the ray won't continue bouncing (won't be reflected) nor it will be splitted, as would be the case on a reflective AND refractive surface, such as glass.




Thanks, what you are saying puts everything into perspective and you explained it well.


----------



## PCpraiser100 (Aug 19, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> Give up guys. If they can't understand my last post, they will not understand why it doesn't matter that the Ati one looks better.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Whoa ok ok, but I do agree this is a tech demo. Its just that the shaders could be too complex for the consumers and stuff, who knows how long will the hardware finally catch up. Nvidia was demonstrating ray-tracing, and thats what they did, but the ridiculously expensive setup was running the tech demo at 30fps, its too demanding. Cinema 2.0 on the other has all those physics and stuff to deal with and the requirements don't really seem like a problem, especially when the video looked like it was running at probably 60-80 fps. BTW, insult taken. I'm not really a developer, I'm just a gamer who loves researching hardware every morning/night. However, my friends are mostly friends with developers. Oh and it is running at 1920x1080p, just got off the phone. My friend told me that he got the demo version of Cinema 2.0 a week ago, which had the system requirements on the disk. The setup that I told you were the recommended system requirements not the minimum. The minimum is Athlon X2 5000+, 3GB of RAM, and an HD 3650.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 19, 2008)

rflair said:


> Thanks, what you are saying puts everything into perspective and you explained it well.



Thanks. And sorry if I was rude at first. I sometimes (maybe always, sadly ) forget that people may lack the knowledge on something because no one cared to teach them. I learnt the lesson, I'll try to be more patient next time. I don't promise anything though. 

@PCpraiser100

I don't know if things have change with the time and they have improved on that front or not. But the demo they made public was on 720p, I'm sure about that. As well as one of the representatives saying they couldn't achieve higher resolutions at the moment.


----------



## PCpraiser100 (Aug 19, 2008)

DarkMatter said:


> Thanks. And sorry if I was rude at first. I sometimes (maybe always, sadly ) forget that people may lack the knowledge on something because no one cared to teach them. I learnt the lesson, I'll try to be more patient next time. I don't promise anything though.
> 
> @PCpraiser100
> 
> I don't know if things have change with the time and they have improved on that front or not. But the demo they made public was on 720p, I'm sure about that. As well as one of the representatives saying they couldn't achieve higher resolutions at the moment.



Dude, its alright. I;m probably a bit more hardwired to AMD. BTW my friend is creating sweet videos and screenshots with the demo of Cinema 2.0, he is even thinking about visually reediting half-life 2 images with DX10.1 images instead, just for fun. its really cool, after all, Gordon's HEV suit really needs more bling lol.


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## DarkMatter (Aug 19, 2008)

Sweet! And when are we going to see them?


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## GSG-9 (Aug 19, 2008)

Im glad I went to sleep that could have gotten nasty if I was around. Im still only on 6 hours of sleep though. Almost work time. 



PCpraiser100 said:


> Dude, its alright. I;m probably a bit more hardwired to AMD. BTW my friend is creating sweet videos and screenshots with the demo of Cinema 2.0, he is even thinking about visually reediting half-life 2 images with DX10.1 images instead, just for fun. its really cool, after all, Gordon's HEV suit really needs more bling lol.



Im confused, he is taking the models from Half life and putting them in this other engine? (Like videos done in 3dsmax except cinema 2.0 and hence real time?)


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## PCpraiser100 (Aug 20, 2008)

GSG-9 said:


> Im glad I went to sleep that could have gotten nasty if I was around. Im still only on 6 hours of sleep though. Almost work time.
> 
> 
> 
> Im confused, he is taking the models from Half life and putting them in this other engine? (Like videos done in 3dsmax except cinema 2.0 and hence real time?)



He is not really putting Half-Life in another engine, he is just modifying the shaders. Anyway, I can't really talk much about it or else people will be lining up for me and my friend so run along home lol. As for seeing screenshots in stuff he can't show me it under certain conditions from AMD. Or else


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## GSG-9 (Aug 20, 2008)

PCpraiser100 said:


> He is not really putting Half-Life in another engine, he is just modifying the shaders. Anyway, I can't really talk much about it or else people will be lining up for me and my friend so run along home lol. As for seeing screenshots in stuff he can't show me it under certain conditions from AMD. Or else



That would be something interesting to have access to. Looking for word to more info.


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## PCpraiser100 (Aug 20, 2008)

GSG-9 said:


> That would be something interesting to have access to. Looking for word to more info.



Either way, we all know what companies are like when it comes to unveiling something that is expectd to be awesome. They make it better. With that in mind, only time will tell by how often will this software be used. Moving on to Ray-Tracing plz.


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## PrudentPrincess (Aug 20, 2008)

Phew I'm glad this thread calmed down if you kept going on arguing and calling eachother names the thread would probably be closed and infractions would be handed out. (If they haven't already )


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## zithe (Aug 20, 2008)

The lighting is very nice. I want to see this in games.


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## GSG-9 (Aug 20, 2008)

PrudentPrincess said:


> Phew I'm glad this thread calmed down if you kept going on arguing and calling eachother names the thread would probably be closed and infractions would be handed out. (If they haven't already )



I think we had some leeway left , Remember the thread on Religion Islam and Candle Which spawned out of of thread on Iraq? As long as its contained and stays on topic..


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