Another Ray Tracing Thread - 3DMark Vantage to introduce Ray Tracing benchmark

If you've seem my threads in the past, you will notice that I am a huge advocate for ray tracing. While there are others on these boards who disagree with my assertions that ray tracing is posed to replace rasterization in many areas in the future (~5 years), others will be quick to disagree. Regardless of what your possition is on the Ray Tracing vs Rasterizations debates... one thing is for sure, ray tracing is becoming a feasible reality.

Once again, it's great to be a PC gamer witnessing the evolution of gaming technology.

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/37150/135/

Espoo (Finland) - Even though Larrabee is at least a year and a half away from being available, FutureMark has released a benchmark that can tell whether Intel's silicon can really compete against Nvidia and AMD in ... Ray-Tracing.

In its New Calico test (Graphics Test 2), 3DMarkVantage features a massive space battle – a scene that does not feature a single non-moveable object: Every object is in motion and is subject to local and global ray-tracing effects such as Parallax Occlusion Mapping, true impostors and volumetric fog.

If you pay attention to ships inside the demo, each and every one is ray-traced. Currently, it seems to us that Nvidia has the edge in ray-traced scenes over ATI. As it happens right now, the GeForce architecture is capable of handling ray tracing very well… after all, Nvidia owns Mental Images, the producer of the Mental Ray ray-tracer.

3DMarkVantage is suitable for all current and upcoming high-spec hardware and promises to squeeze every texel out of your graphics card and every hertz of out your CPU.

We wont be seeing Ray Tracing properly for another decade, yay to be a PC gamer:|Egghead360

Based on what information?

Didn't you know? Users on this board are only obsessed with "teh games". They don't care about the technology that goes into it.slickchris7777

lol 'teh games'

yes coz that what we buy 'teh consoles' for hehe

[QUOTE="Egghead360"]We wont be seeing Ray Tracing properly for another decade, yay to be a PC gamer:|rimnet00

Based on what information?

[QUOTE="rimnet00"]

[QUOTE="Egghead360"]We wont be seeing Ray Tracing properly for another decade, yay to be a PC gamer:|Egghead360

Based on what information?

"High end computer cells"... lmao. I worked with ray tracing in the past, so I'm speaking out of experiance from both that, and from looking at future hardware being introduced in the next few years. Once again, as stated in the post, I'm not going to argue about the details, because quite frankly it's a debate I would rather have on a forum with other's who hold crediability and have authority in their statements.

The point of this thread is simple. Ray tracing is here, and being introduced in a full extent in 3DMark's benchmark is a huge step forward.

[QUOTE="Egghead360"][QUOTE="rimnet00"]

[QUOTE="Egghead360"]We wont be seeing Ray Tracing properly for another decade, yay to be a PC gamer:|rimnet00

Based on what information?

"High end computer cells"... lmao. I worked with ray tracing in the past, so I'm speaking out of experiance from both that, and from looking at future hardware being introduced in the next few years. Once again, as stated in the post, I'm not going to argue about the details, because quite frankly it's a debate I would rather have on a forum with other's who hold crediability and have authority in their statements.

The point of this thread is simple. Ray tracing is here, and being introduced in a full extent in 3DMark's benchmark is a huge step forward.

please don't shoot me but i heard that the cell in the ps 3 was great with ray tracing because of the high number crunching involved.GARRYTH

The cell processor was fairly good with it, which is very true. This is due to the nature of it's architecture, and it being able to scale very well with parrallized computation. However, it was only good "relative" to everything else that would out in the consumer market at the time.

When it comes to programmer techno-jargon I am completely illiterate. What is "ray-tracing" and "rasterization?"foxhound_fox

I'll try to generalize it as best I can.

Games have been using rasterization for years, in order to create lighting effects in games. Essentially think of it like this... you are in a dark room with a camera with no flash on it. However, you are special, and you still know where everything is. You take s picture with the camera, then you decide... I want to put a light source "here".... lets say its the sun. You then attempt to shade in color into the scene, to appropriately match how it should look. The more lights you have, the more real the scene can look... but it also gets really hard to deal with all these light sources....

Ray tracing, is different. This time, imagine you are in this same room. Except, it's not dark and you have the actual light sources there. Now you take a camera photo... flash or no flash, your choice. Obviously, the difference will be huge. Technically, ray tracing literally emulates how real light works... by calculating each "ray" and how it effects the scene.

This is the best way of putting it imo.

I'm STILL unclear as to what ray-tracing works even after reading the above. My thoughts were originally: You have a class ball sitting next to a puddle of water, the world is reflected off of the puddle of water and that reflextion is then reflected off the glass ball with no loss in visual quality.:(

So apparently, it deals with nothing but lighting? Hmm, graphics cards should make easy work of ray tracing, with their hundreds of precessing cores.

You can already sort of see were things are headed with graphics if you look at Intels Nehalem CPUs being able to render graphics on the chip itself, to an extent of course. Not sure what the exact termonology is.

I'll try to generalize it as best I can.

Games have been using rasterization for years, in order to create lighting effects in games. Essentially think of it like this... you are in a dark room with a camera with no flash on it. However, you are special, and you still know where everything is. You take s picture with the camera, then you decide... I want to put a light source "here".... lets say its the sun. You then attempt to shade in color into the scene, to appropriately match how it should look. The more lights you have, the more real the scene can look... but it also gets really hard to deal with all these light sources....

Ray tracing, is different. This time, imagine you are in this same room. Except, it's not dark and you have the actual light sources there. Now you take a camera photo... flash or no flash, your choice. Obviously, the difference will be huge. Technically, ray tracing literally emulates how real light works... by calculating each "ray" and how it effects the scene.

This is the best way of putting it imo.

rimnet00

Right now the very best hardware can push maybe 40 frames at the default settings for that test. Average gamer hardware at this point can push about 20. Which is nice, I guess.

My issue with raytracing is that I don't know how this affects engine architects. Are they going to have to relearn their methods?crucifine

My issue with it is that it only affects lighting quality, not image quality, which is my absolute highest priority at this point....I don't want to dedicated processing cycles to calculating advanced lighting techniques when they'd better be used on geometry, physics, antialiasing, filtering, higher texture resolutions, advanced shaders, and on and on.

Give me hardware that can run all that without winding itself and I'm cool on ray tracing in acceptably small doseages.