Friday, June 27th 2008
Radeon HD4800 Series Supports a 100% Ray-Traced Pipeline
During AMD's recent Cinema 2.0 event, TG Daily caught up with representatives of JulesWorld. They are associated with the video production process of an unnamed movie studio and adopted components that are standard in the FX industry (AMD Opteron + Nvidia Quadro). Ray-tracing was an early focus of the company and they were told that JulesWorld started experimenting with a 100% ray-traced pipeline on a GPU with the arrival of ATI's R600 (2900XT) chip. And the results were impressive.
JulesWorld will be releasing OTOY and LightScape, two distinctive technologies that could shape the future of movie and games production. The company developed a ray-tracer that uses elements of the DirectX 9 API as well as its own high-level code that uses Tessellation and anti-aliasing algorithms.
Urbach further added that ray-tracing in real time became a reality with the Radeon 2900XT - which was used for a series of trailers for last summer's hit-move Transformers. All those Transformers teaser trailers were rendered on a GPU and - more importantly - directed in real-time. The producer of these trailers had complete freedom to play around with a "virtual lens" and direct the trailer in his own way.
In terms of performance, the Radeon 2900XT 1GB rendered Transformers scenes in 20-30 frames per second, in 720p resolution and no Anti-Aliasing. With the Radeon 3870, the test scene jumped to 60 fps, with a drop to 20 fps when the proprietary Anti-Aliasing algorithm was applied. Urbach mentioned that the Radeon 4870 hits the same 60 fps - and stays at that level with Anti-Aliasing (a ray-tracer is not expecting more than 60 fps.) JulesWorld's technology also works on Nvidia GeForce 8800 cards and above, but the lack of a tessellation unit causes a bit more work on the ray-tracer side.
A ray-tracer is limited by the amount of local memory on your video card, so if you are able to get a Radeon 4850 or 4870 with 1 GB or even more of on-board memory, you have very capable hardware. JulesWorld's LightStage technology can take wireframes consisting of an insane 32 million vectors to enable real world characters and their expressions. That means: Extra memory on your graphics card doesn't hurt.
Source:
TG Daily
JulesWorld will be releasing OTOY and LightScape, two distinctive technologies that could shape the future of movie and games production. The company developed a ray-tracer that uses elements of the DirectX 9 API as well as its own high-level code that uses Tessellation and anti-aliasing algorithms.
Urbach further added that ray-tracing in real time became a reality with the Radeon 2900XT - which was used for a series of trailers for last summer's hit-move Transformers. All those Transformers teaser trailers were rendered on a GPU and - more importantly - directed in real-time. The producer of these trailers had complete freedom to play around with a "virtual lens" and direct the trailer in his own way.
In terms of performance, the Radeon 2900XT 1GB rendered Transformers scenes in 20-30 frames per second, in 720p resolution and no Anti-Aliasing. With the Radeon 3870, the test scene jumped to 60 fps, with a drop to 20 fps when the proprietary Anti-Aliasing algorithm was applied. Urbach mentioned that the Radeon 4870 hits the same 60 fps - and stays at that level with Anti-Aliasing (a ray-tracer is not expecting more than 60 fps.) JulesWorld's technology also works on Nvidia GeForce 8800 cards and above, but the lack of a tessellation unit causes a bit more work on the ray-tracer side.
A ray-tracer is limited by the amount of local memory on your video card, so if you are able to get a Radeon 4850 or 4870 with 1 GB or even more of on-board memory, you have very capable hardware. JulesWorld's LightStage technology can take wireframes consisting of an insane 32 million vectors to enable real world characters and their expressions. That means: Extra memory on your graphics card doesn't hurt.
37 Comments on Radeon HD4800 Series Supports a 100% Ray-Traced Pipeline
Welcome to the forums dude!
They had a SGi super computer at Amoco when I was going up(Dad worked there)about the time Jurassic Park came out. Of course they used them to make 3/d models of oil under the ground, but there was a few demo games on it:eek: Lets just say those demo games looked close to what games look like today. I saw the future and I knew it when I was playing a racing game on a SGI supercomputer as a kid in the early 90s.
and in comparison as to how far CGI has come - (2001) Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, a very detailed, all CGI movie used massive amounts of computing power; taken from wiki:If anyone had seen any of the behind the scenes, making ofs, etc - I remember a bit where the developers were showcasing just how much was rendered for each model; each character was rendered down to fingerprints - if needed, they could zoom in towards a finger on a rendered character, and you'd be able to see the ridges on the fingertip that gives you a fingerprint.
here a pic of an example of the rendering that was done for the main character in the film:
A bit of overkill, IMO - but the capability to do that wasn't possible 10 years prior, if comparing to what we saw in Jurassic Park, for example.
Anyhow, back OT - I think this is wonderful news to hear what all the HD4000 series are capable of. This kind of news speaks very well of the new hardware, and should truly help both AMD and ATI regain a very strong foothold.
Think that ray-tracing is a physically correct rendering method so the geometry has to be correct for each rendered pixel. This is especially true for curved surfaces. Under rasterization shaders take care of making a sucession of adjacent flat poligons look like a curved surface, but on ray-tracing you need each pixel have a different physically correct polygon or it will render a sucession of flat surfces, which is what the model really is.
1- This is how a shaded sphere looks like under rasterization. Notice how the shader makes the surface appear smooth even though the geometry is a lot less detailed as you an see on the borders.
2- This is the actual geometry. This is also how the model would look like when using ray-tracing. Because the rays casted from the light to the surface and then to the camera encounter the same angle each polygon is shaded as a flat surface. The bright spot has gone too, as none of the polygons have the required angle to reflect the light to the camera.
3- One iteration of tesselation aplied to the model. Definately not enough, but at least 2 of the polys are bright and the geometry is more detailed as you can see on the borders.
4- Four iterations of tesselation. Now the sphere is much more detailed and looks better overall than the rasterized one except for the bright accent. To get the proper look you need each pixel render one different polygon. In essence you can "fake" the proper look as in rastezation, but what would be the point of going to ray-tracing then?
1./ With 2900XT you need to do gazzillions of polys on the CPU and send this data to the GPU. The CPU is the bottleneck
2./ With the 3870 DX10.1 the tesselator is exposed meaning you can take CPU/geometry shortcuts and the 3870 will do the geometry much faster than the CPU could.
BUT if the same geometry info is sent from the CPU to the GPU, i STILL CANNOT SEE how/why the 3870 is do much faster than 2900XT.
THEREFORE, if the geometry was precalculated, then 2900XT and 3870 would have very similar performance at raytracing. However, if the geometry is calculated on the fly, [CPU+3870] is much faster than [CPU+2900XT] due to 3870 assisting with geometry instancing.
Is that the story?