Ray tracing soon to go real-time for 3D rendering

Iria · Aug 6, 2006, 05:17 AM

Source: Ars Technica
_________
Ray tracing is something of a holy grail in graphics processing. By using standard optics equations to calculate the paths that light takes in a scene, a 3D renderer can produce scenes that are much more realistic than those produced by the kind of raster graphics that powers all 3D games and most computer-animated movies. What puts ray tracing out of reach for most rendering applications is the sheer amount of processing power that it takes to determine the correct behavior of the billions of beams of light that can illuminate a large, complex scene. Fairly recently, it was thought by most graphics experts that while ray tracing might see more widespread use in computer animation, it would remain forever out of reach of real-time 3D rendering on standard PC hardware.

An article in this month's issue of Scientific American reports on the work of graphics researchers who are close to making real-time ray tracing a reality for everything from industrial applications to computer gaming. The article is centered around work being done at Intel, the University of Texas at Austin, and Saarland University. Researchers at all three of these sites are working on software and hardware techniques to speed up ray tracing by factors of 100. In the rest of this post, I'll take a closer look at the projects at Intel and Saarland.

Aug 6, 2006, 05:17 AM	#1
Iria DriverHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 7,275 Rep Power: 89	Ray tracing soon to go real-time for 3D rendering Source: Ars Technica _________ Ray tracing is something of a holy grail in graphics processing. By using standard optics equations to calculate the paths that light takes in a scene, a 3D renderer can produce scenes that are much more realistic than those produced by the kind of raster graphics that powers all 3D games and most computer-animated movies. What puts ray tracing out of reach for most rendering applications is the sheer amount of processing power that it takes to determine the correct behavior of the billions of beams of light that can illuminate a large, complex scene. Fairly recently, it was thought by most graphics experts that while ray tracing might see more widespread use in computer animation, it would remain forever out of reach of real-time 3D rendering on standard PC hardware. An article in this month's issue of Scientific American reports on the work of graphics researchers who are close to making real-time ray tracing a reality for everything from industrial applications to computer gaming. The article is centered around work being done at Intel, the University of Texas at Austin, and Saarland University. Researchers at all three of these sites are working on software and hardware techniques to speed up ray tracing by factors of 100. In the rest of this post, I'll take a closer look at the projects at Intel and Saarland.