[ars] Caustic Graphics launches real-time ray tracing platform - Page 2 - Overclock.net

iandh · 07-04-09

Yay, more shiny cars with crappy road textures.

Jarhead · 07-04-09

The thing that I found most interesting about this was their use of Opengl extensions which they plan to carry over into the gaming product.

As for Nvidia or DAAMIT buying them, I would have to guess Nvidia because DAAMIT already has their own ray tracing project being developed by Julesworld called "Cinema 2.0", and by the looks of it are WAY ahead of Nvidia, and probably Intel. DAAMIT's stuff has already been demoed running on current hardware(Phenom and two 4870s) and looked much better than this. But they were using a tweaked version of DX9, and obviously have a lot more money to throw around.

But basically I think that the game industry absolutely MUST switch over to ray tracing simply to drop their development costs. Drop the development costs and everybody benefits, especially the indie devs that have more creativity than their budgets can handle.

003 · 07-04-09

Cool but no reason why the card should be $4000. It's a bunch of slow hardware fabricated on an ancient process.

nyder · 07-05-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by 003

Cool but no reason why the card should be $4000. It's a bunch of slow hardware fabricated on an ancient process.

because currently they are marketing developers.

nathris · 07-05-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by [Teh Root]

Ray Tracingh is to much work for a single GPU each Cuastic Board has 640 Parallel Proceesors, all it does is the calculations for the lines and nothing else. BT, the company is mostly made up of former Apple Engineers

Actually the reason they give is that the IO is too slow. Which is complete bull****.

There is no way their little 30 Watt, 100MHz chip with it's 64bit DDR2 should be able to compete with a 150W+, 750MHz chip with 256bit GDDR5 and over a teraflop of computing power.

They say that they have configured the hardware to increase IO performance, but the Caustic board likely maxes out at 10GB/s with it's slow DDR2. I highly doubt their little optimizations can come close to the 140GB/s of the 4870 or the 160GB/s of the GTX 285.

Sure we probably won't be able to stick a 9500GT in and get ray tracing like with PhysX, but a properly programmed GPGPU library for high end video cards should have no trouble at all. Its all a marketing gimmick to get us to spend $4000 on a card that still can't properly do ray tracing.

timw4mail · 07-05-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jarhead

The thing that I found most interesting about this was their use of Opengl extensions which they plan to carry over into the gaming product.

As for Nvidia or DAAMIT buying them, I would have to guess Nvidia because DAAMIT already has their own ray tracing project being developed by Julesworld called "Cinema 2.0", and by the looks of it are WAY ahead of Nvidia, and probably Intel. DAAMIT's stuff has already been demoed running on current hardware(Phenom and two 4870s) and looked much better than this. But they were using a tweaked version of DX9, and obviously have a lot more money to throw around.

But basically I think that the game industry absolutely MUST switch over to ray tracing simply to drop their development costs. Drop the development costs and everybody benefits, especially the indie devs that have more creativity than their budgets can handle.

Why must you call ATI DAAMIT? WHY?

lordikon · 07-05-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by [Teh Root]

Ray Tracing is still amazing. The cmplex mathmatic proceses used to trace EACH in
dividual light beam backwards is amazing.

Quoted from WEikipedia:

Ray-tracing is simply a brute force method to recreate exactly what happens in real life. In real life, everything you see with your eyes is simply billions of photons that have come from the sun (or another light source) and bounced off other surfaces, or been refracted through the air and the atmosphere. Ray tracing is trying to do the same thing, send out millions of rays, reflect them off of multiple surfaces, until they get to the camera.

The benefits of ray tracing in games is absolutely enormous....and so is the performance cost.

With ray tracing you no longer have to have methods setup for occlusion culling (skipping the rendering of things that aren't in view to save time), because you know that whatever a ray doesn't hit isn't in view. I guess you no longer need shaders in the traditional sense anymore, because instead of per-vertex or per-pixel, everything would be per-ray.

Reflections would no longer need to be processed in a separate step either, and reflections could have the same quality as the rest of the image (usually they use lower detail versions of models). Additionally, reflections with reflections within them are feasible. Right now you'd almost never see something like that in a game. The tricks that Valve had to do in Portal to allow you to see to certain depth levels through portals would no longer be "tricks", ray casts would let portals be done just like anything else.

Basically, all the special stuff we have to do with today's technology to make games look good would no longer apply. You don't need to do anything special when you're doing things just like they occur in the real world, because realism will happen on its own when you're emulating real life.

jrharvey · 07-05-09

I dont really care about the realtime thing but I really hope this accelerates renderers for programs like Rhino or 3DMax and others. I would love to see Vray, Brazil, Mental Ray or whatever start to use this.

DuckieHo · 07-05-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by lordikon

Ray-tracing is simply a brute force method to recreate exactly what happens in real life. In real life, everything you see with your eyes is simply billions of photons that have come from the sun (or another light source) and bounced off other surfaces, or been refracted through the air and the atmosphere. Ray tracing is trying to do the same thing, send out millions of rays, reflect them off of multiple surfaces, until they get to the camera.

The benefits of ray tracing in games is absolutely enormous....and so is the performance cost.

With ray tracing you no longer have to have methods setup for occlusion culling (skipping the rendering of things that aren't in view to save time), because you know that whatever a ray doesn't hit isn't in view. I guess you no longer need shaders in the traditional sense anymore, because instead of per-vertex or per-pixel, everything would be per-ray.

Reflections would no longer need to be processed in a separate step either, and reflections could have the same quality as the rest of the image (usually they use lower detail versions of models). Additionally, reflections with reflections within them are feasible. Right now you'd almost never see something like that in a game. The tricks that Valve had to do in Portal to allow you to see to certain depth levels through portals would no longer be "tricks", ray casts would let portals be done just like anything else.

Basically, all the special stuff we have to do with today's technology to make games look good would no longer apply. You don't need to do anything special when you're doing things just like they occur in the real world, because realism will happen on its own when you're emulating real life.

Don't forget the other side benefit.... free collision physics processing. To Ray Trace, you need to know where the surfaces are.

timw4mail · 07-05-09

Quote:

Originally Posted by DuckieHo

Don't forget the other side benefit.... free collision physics processing. To Ray Trace, you need to know where the surfaces are.

Makes me think that NVidia is going to fight with all their might against this...after all, PhysX is a selling point for them.

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[ars] Caustic Graphics launches real-time ray tracing platform

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