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Raytracing Engine Done Quicker: Images, Video & Source
Raytracing Engine Done Quicker: Images, Video & Source
Last updated on January 2, 2008 - 12:13.
Pixelmachine is a Raytracing engine done over the course of a weekend in just 715 lines of code. Author Jer documented his progress and experience of writing the engine in standard C/C++ from scratch and provides images, videos and even the source code for everyone to check out.
I've always liked the idea of ray-tracing to render 3D images with crazy accuracy. On Saturday night (being a huge nerd) I decided I'd try to write one from scratch for the hell of it. By from scratch I mean I started with this C++ code in a text file.
--superjer.com
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Last updated on January 2, 2008 - 12:13
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Nice. This guy just sat down Saturday night (no life?) writing a whole Raytracing engine. For rendering 3D images overly accurate this isn't a bad idea.
Superjer lol
since i read an article a long while ago (in gamestar), i think that raytracing could be the future for videogames. even the big engines like unreal engine 3 or the cryengine can only come close to shadow and light simulation. and here it takes a lot of power to perform it. raytracing is, as far as i know, only taking the cpu power and there is a quake 3 raytracing version with really accurate shadows and so on. maybe it takes some years, but i guess it will have it´s place in the gaming market eventually
The Gamestar article was based around the work of Daniel Pohl (of quake.de) who is now with Intel. As one can see from the Intel presentations mentioned at Daniel's site, Intel is quite interested in Raytracing -- see: http://www.idfun.de/temp/q4rt/
Intel's Larrabee GPU is rumored to incorporate Raytracing features as well.
What about the ALUs of a geforce 8, couldn't every ALU calculate one ray and thus speed up raytracing a lot?
Honestly, I don't know -- am not very versed when it comes to hardware stuff. But as far as I understand, the ALUs do contribute to stream content processing, so yeah, it might have an impact on calculating rays and such.
Still, take a look at http://www.idfun.de/temp/q4rt/grafik/FallIDF2007_05.jpg to see what's possible performance-wise. But as gross.tim already mentioned, calculations are mainly done on the CPU, not the GPU.