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How many years till real-time ray-tracing?
Deathpooper
Member Posts: 265
10 years? 20? 50?
My guess is around 10-15. By that time we should have CPUs powerful enough to run real-time ray-tracing.
What do you think?
Comments
Could you please inform me of what ray-tracing is, in general? And how does real-time ray-tracing differ from turn-based ray-tracing? I really dont know, and would like to, thanks.
I think it's coming as soon as developers get completely used to working multithreaded for smaller applications like games. and then processor manufactures completely give up on the idea of super powerful single processing chips in favor of 200 or so super-tiny-mircro-chips along with completely redesigned short term memory storage.... so a long way off for true ray tracing on a desktop, though you can fake it good enough.
ray tracing is essentially tracing your line of sight. taking a single eye then shooting rays out into the scene and using the points that that ray has touched to make a picture of the screen. I might be completely wrong though since I'm barely self trained in 3D programming.
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
Wiki = friend!
working from memory is good every once and a while... the internet isn't your brain
I find it amazing that by 2020 first world countries will be competing to get immigrants.
Raytracing casts rays from lights to determine how a shadow will form, its also used to determine what a reflection or refraction would look like. Its still a long way off since lighting is usually the biggest hit on performance in games, even though the new graphics cards coming in a week are capable of Global Illumination which is a form of raytracing. However, I believe its achieved by pre-baking the shadows which is what many games do.
within now and 10 years is my guess.
Playing: Everthing
Played: DAoC,AC2,EvE,SWG,WAR,MXO,CoX,EQ2,L2,LOTRO,SB,UO,WoW.
I have played every MMO that has ever come out.
My God! I don't even want to think of the kind of rig you'd need to make an MMO with fluid real time Ray Tracing O.O!
Multi-core processors -- ones that have CPU/GPU cores on the same die -- will make real-time ray tracing a reality...so we should see the first real-time photorealistic ray tracing engines some time in 2010 - 2012; MMOGs? About 2015 or so.
AMD said they will have a 16-core CPU/GPU chip on the market in 2010. One of those and a 500GB Solid State Disk Drive and we're in business!
Actually there's been a demo programming scene doing this since around 2000. That was the year that graphics programming became "too fast to be fun." In order for the geekboiz to be able to wave their coding e-peens, they decided to work on real-time ray tracing projects. It really isn't my thing since it uses WWWWAAAAAAYYYYYYYYY too much math. Here are some links to some sites with demos...
This generic page has several demos and some links to other projects and sites.
The Realtime Raytracing Realm has a pretty good assortment of demos.
RealStorm actually has a playable bowling game that uses real-time ray tracing.
A little poking and proding around the 'net will probably unearth a few more demos. I'm kinda surprised that NeHe doesn't have anything!
At any rate, it's not as far off as you might think. We're just at the simple shapes, spheres, cones, cubes, etc., at the moment. Not unlike where Polygonal graphics were in 1992.
Not sure what Ray did or why you want to follow where he goes all the time, but some kind of tracking device, a pack of dogs, hidden cameras, bug his phone lines etc.
I don't see why you have to wait any number of years to trace Ray, you could just do it now if you wanted to.
Poor guy.
almost funny...almost.
I look for crytek to be the first to market a real-time photorealistic ray tracing game engine...'bout 2010 or so.
A long Time.
And for those who don't know, ray-tracing is usually applied to 3D renders (as a texture or material)
It makes it more realistic, usually used on glass / water
"Don't hold breath about another KOTOR game coming from Bioware" - Chris Preistly
"Bioware is more intrested in pursueing development of it's own Intellectual properties"
- James Henly
Ray Tracing has been possible on computer systems for the past couple of years your right yes there are Demo Graphics Programmers writing lil demos here and there. But thats just it....they are demos. There's a huge difference between what a Demo program does than an actual full application. I work in graphics programming (for simulation engines) and we don't even use ray tracing though I'm sure if they could find some one willing to pay and the engine could actually take the hit we'd find a way to add it into our engine some how but it'd be about the only thing the engine would do while that feature is on.
Ray Tracing and lighting in general are so incredibly expensive (even with shaders) most Engine programmers are always going to try and find a way to 'simulate' first to save frames for other features like Particle Engines & the ability to render lots and lots of polygons for detail.
NeHe doesn't have anything because the current group running it haven't put up any new tutorial demos in ages. I'm not even sure the people who use the tutoral section would understand Ray Tracing or what they're looking at in the first place ... as for the submitted demos...who knows
I'm not even sure they've updated that section regularly.
I dont think we'll see Ray Tracing in games any time soon. Personally the day they do put it in games and it doesnt' bog down everything else will be pretty awsome (the cpu has to handle basically everything the GPU doesn't which is alot, adding ray tracing would be like sticking a sticking a heavy object ontop of an already unbalanced pile of stuff, making it rather unwielded beyond compare) I'm not even sure games NEED Ray Tracing, I'd rather see more physics and more innovative gameplay first. Game makers NEED to get back on the task of making great Games instead of making great new ways to blow up the same box. As some failures in game markets have shown us pretty does not make it worth spending your cash on.
Please Refer to Doom Cat with all conspiracies & evil corporation complaints. He'll give you the simple explination of..WE"RE ALL DOOMED!
Intel is working on a project called Larrabee.It will be a GPU able to be used for other tasks like real time ray tracing, physics (perhaps the reason why Intel bought Havoc ) and many more that will free the CPU from such heavy tasks.
They plan to release this strange chip around 2009.
Shouldn't this be in developers corner?