Thursday, August 14th 2008
Quake 4 run Ray-tracing Enabled on Intel Larrabee
Part of the series of published slides by French website CanardPlus on slides part of the IDF event shows a picture of Quake 4 run with ray-tracing enabled on Intel's upcoming GPU codenamed Larrabee. The slide shows the advantages of ray-tracing, being accurate shadows, reflections, and the image looking more natural that what conventional shaders can achieve in bringing about.
Source:
CanardPlus
38 Comments on Quake 4 run Ray-tracing Enabled on Intel Larrabee
In the end with Larrabee it will come down to performance-per-dollar, the bang-for-buck ratio. If it can give more 3DMarks and give people more fps in Crysis (or it's sequels by then) for less cash than competition, then it will be a winner. And let's not forget compatibility, something AMD/ATI and nVidia have an advantage in. Otherwise it will go the route of XGI Volari, SiS Xabre, and S3 Chrome GPUs.
In fact for all three (XGI Volari, SiS Xabre, and S3 Chrome) performance issues were not the key in their downfall. While not great at the time compared to what ATi and nVidia were offering, all three could somewhat "keep-up", at least with low-mid-end offerings from ATI/nVidia. In reality all three were sunk by poor drivers and compatibility with existing gaming titles at the time.
Also keep in mind in my shots the only part that is ray traced in the reflections, if it was on a modern engine, and higher resolution textures and higher poly models I think this would look quite impressive overall. (I dont think its the techs fault ti looks bad, it was the choice of screenshot, I mean the picture that started this thread had like 6 faces total, when the point of ray tracing is accurate lighting you kinda need a complex scene to render to show off what it can do.
If something like Larabee performs well and succeeds in pleasing developer teams, then products from ATi and Nvidia will have to change drastically, or end up ceasing to serve a purpose in the 3d industry. Don't confuse shadows with shading. A lot of shadows in real life are either subtle, or unnoticed; so all these applications going over the deep end, insisting on a bazillion shadows - with multiple layers - are getting a bit overkill.
However, proper levels of shading are what enable boring photo imaged textures, to actually seem to come to life; which ultimatley is just an illusion more or less; unfortunate, but that's the state of the architecture still. Until full on vertex shading, that won't change.
Shadows make things more detailed than high resolution textures alone, we already have high resolution textures (Crysis? Id's new engine etc) if we implement current technology (Occlusion mapping/bump/uv maps etc) with ray tracing surfaces will appear much more realistic. Well said :) Shadows (in real life) round door frames exist, in a game this is simply shaded in in most cases, such things rendered as shadows would add crucial levels of realism to 3d games especially in dynamic environments with a flashlight or muzzle flash etc. I would not underestimate them.
pics.computerbase.de/2/2/5/3/3/4.jpg
Then you'll see how shadows help I'm guessing.