Hardware Accelerator To Open Up New Rendering Techniques for Gaming? (Happy John?)

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2345650,00.asp

I found this bit of technology pretty interesting. It's essentially an accelerator designed to allow for realtime ray-tracing at high resolutions. It will be able to coexist with existing graphics hardware and effectively allow developers to incorporate advanced CGI rendering techniques into games in realtime.

For the rendering illiterate, ray-tracing is an ages-old rendering technique that traces individual beams of light to the camera to create a scene with accurate shadows and reflections. It works with mathematical primitives that include curved surface beyond the basic triangles we work with today. It's still at the foundation of most pre-rendered cgi (though many other effects are layered on top of it, just as they are with most games today).

I can't see people buying a seperate card for this, but if Nvidia or Ati incorporates this technology as they did with PhysX this could really lead to a pretty big jump in graphics, bringing us a step closer to that dream of Toy Story-quality graphics.

Just so you know, your title makes no sense. Polygons would still be needed. This accelerator isn't replacing polygons, its just a different way of rendering than being used now in real time.

Plus even things like NURBS in pretty much every single software rendered are still converted to either polygons or micro-polygons when rendered. Also I don't know where you're getting the notion that raytracing in general "works with mathematical primitives that include curved surface beyond the basic triangles we work with today." That's just not true at all. Raytracing doesn't change the geometry type used in a scene and is just a way of calculating the effect of light on a scene. Using raytracing doesn't give you more curved or smooth surfaces, it just gives you a more realistic light model.

So they're finally releasing the 3DO M2? Awesome!

Seriously though, they've been aiming for real-time raytracing for years. I hope they demo this at E3, because after all this time I can't believe a bit of it until I see it in person.

James

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Originally Posted by Shin Johnpv

Just so you know, your title makes no sense. Polygons would still be needed.

Just so you know even things like NURBS in pretty much every single software rendered are still converted to either polygons or micro-polygons when rendered.

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Well... Perhaps it's misleading, yeah, we'd still have polygons in the scene, but ray-tracing as a rendering technology is capable of true spline curves, spheres, and other mathematical primitives without reducing them to a polygon mesh. NURBS are another matter entirely, but you can definitely do true curved surfaces with raytracing.


Notice the whole thing is pretty much constructed from positive and negative spheres, cylinders and cubes. There's no need for it to be reduced to a mesh.

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Originally Posted by James

Seriously though, they've been aiming for real-time raytracing for years. I hope they demo this at E3, because after all this time I can't believe a bit of it until I see it in person.

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I believe you're confusing the M2 with "Project X", which later became the Nuon. And yeah, it's been an aspiration for a long time, and it's even been done in limited capacities by computer demos, but it makes sense now (and in conjuction with traditional rendering) in a way that it didn't before.

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Originally Posted by Frogacuda

I can't see people buying a seperate card for this, but if Nvidia or Ati incorporates this technology as they did with PhysX this could really lead to a pretty big jump in graphics, bringing us a step closer to that dream of Toy Story-quality graphics.

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That was pretty much my first thought after reading about this. Trying to sell a specialized processor board during a time of CPU/GPU convergence would be a colossal mistake. I don't really see much of a future for this company, aside from a brief stint selling cards for workstations, but hopefully this is a sign that realtime raytracing is on the horizon for video games.

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Originally Posted by Frogacuda

Well... Perhaps it's misleading, yeah, we'd still have polygons in the scene, but ray-tracing as a rendering technology is capable of true spline curves, spheres, and other mathematical primitives without reducing them to a polygon mesh. NURBS are another matter entirely, but you can definitely do true curved surfaces with raytracing.


Notice the whole thing is pretty much constructed from positive and negative spheres, cylinders and cubes. There's no need for it to be reduced to a mesh.

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No you're wrong. Raytracing has no effect on that. Again all raytracing handles is the way the light in the scene is calculated. Again regardless of how you're rendering something, every single object in a scene is converted to micropolygons at rendering. Every single software render I know of handles things that way. On page 275 of Jeremy Birn's book Digital Lighting and Rendering second Edition it even states "Reyes renders curved surfaces, such as NURBS or sub-division surfaces, by dividing them into micropolygons, small quadrilaterals each about one pixel in size or smaller. Each curved surface is divided into exactly enough micropolygons to appear completely smooth at the rendered resolution. If a shader is applying displacement mapping, the displacement will also be broken down into micropolygons." Reyes stands for Render Everything You ever Saw, and Reyes and Reyes algorithms are the heart of pretty much every single software renderer out there. From Renderman to Mental Ray to Brazil.

I'm sorry dude but you're wrong all raytracing deals with is the light model, and how light is rendered in a scene. It doesn't change the type of geometry you can use or render. A raycaster or scanline renderer, which is the other type of software renderer, can do NURBS, Sub Ds and Polygons just as well as a raytracer can.

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Originally Posted by kedawa

That was pretty much my first thought after reading about this. Trying to sell a specialized processor board during a time of CPU/GPU convergence would be a colossal mistake. I don't really see much of a future for this company, aside from a brief stint selling cards for workstations, but hopefully this is a sign that realtime raytracing is on the horizon for video games.

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The market for this isn't the video game player honestly. Its not for regular PCs. The real market for this is the film/special fx/commercial industry. Where a lot of time is spent rendering, this won't bring that to real time. If how ever it takes movie render times from 12 hours a frame to 6 hours a frame with out having to lose anything visually, well that's a huge bonus.

The thing is though they have to make this work with the renderers that are already out there. This thing needs to be able to talk and work with Renderman, and Mental Ray for instance. It can't be a proprietary format, it needs to work with whats out there now.

Nice to see you running school on this, Johnny. :D

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Originally Posted by Shin Johnpv

No you're wrong. Raytracing has no effect on that. Again all raytracing handles is the way the light in the scene is calculated.

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Originally Posted by Wikipedia

One important advantage ray casting offered over older scanline algorithms is its ability to easily deal with non-planar surfaces and solids, such as cones and spheres. If a mathematical surface can be intersected by a ray, it can be rendered using ray casting. Elaborate objects can be created by using solid modeling techniques and easily rendered.

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I understand raytracing quite a bit. I used to work with it back when it was POVRay and you had to model your scene with text. I'm pretty familiar with how it works and what it's capable of.

You keep bringing up modern modeling primitives like NURBS, and I already explained to you that that's not the same kind of primitive and they don't work like that. But raytracing can do true spheres, cones, cylinders, and some spline-based surfaces.

Whether or not the current version of 3D Studio Max does it that way or not is irrelevant. Ray-tracing a rendering technology works with other primitives because it's based on light collision and reflection, and the math to do that with curved surfaces isn't especially complicated, and less so than breaking it down into a mesh.

Practically, you may be correct that it's seldom done that way anymore. I wouldn't know that as well as you. But I do know how raytracing works and I will fight you to the death that it can do true non-planar primitives. There is absolutely no need to break down these primitives into a mesh.