12 votes

Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

9 comments

  1. [8]
    balooga
    Link
    I'm not entirely sure what the point of the article is. Sure, ray tracing has been around for ages. I remember playing around with Ray Dream 3D in the '90s. Though these renders looked great, the...

    I'm not entirely sure what the point of the article is. Sure, ray tracing has been around for ages. I remember playing around with Ray Dream 3D in the '90s. Though these renders looked great, the drawback was always how long they took to generate. Like the article mentions, Pixar's render farm took 4 hours to draw a single frame of Toy Story back in the day. I haven't been following the gaming press lately, but I assume the reason we're talking about this is that it can now be done in realtime? If so, that's pretty sweet. In another hardware generation or two graphics are probably going to make another big leap forward.

    13 votes
    1. [5]
      spctrvl
      Link Parent
      More specifically, raytracing has been getting a lot of attention because nVidia's latest generation of cards include dedicated hardware acceleration for it, and they're hyping it so hard that...

      More specifically, raytracing has been getting a lot of attention because nVidia's latest generation of cards include dedicated hardware acceleration for it, and they're hyping it so hard that they've changed their prefix from GTX to RTX. The numbers I've heard so far are relatively unimpressive, 30fps at 1080p, but that's real time by any definition and it'll hopefully get better as the platform matures.

      10 votes
      1. wise
        Link Parent
        wow, 30fps 1080p real time raytracing? That's really impressive by itself! Having coded ray tracing myself (just 2 years ago actually) and seeing how really simple scenes took a very long time......

        wow, 30fps 1080p real time raytracing? That's really impressive by itself! Having coded ray tracing myself (just 2 years ago actually) and seeing how really simple scenes took a very long time... This is pretty amazing.

        2 votes
      2. [3]
        loto
        Link Parent
        I thought the RTX 2080ti (I think that's the name?) is supposed to be more powerful than the 1080ti, which could already manage more than that @1080p in new games. Is the ray-tracing that...

        I thought the RTX 2080ti (I think that's the name?) is supposed to be more powerful than the 1080ti, which could already manage more than that @1080p in new games. Is the ray-tracing that intensive, even with the dedicated hardware? (disclaimer: I nothing about this yet, don't have the time to read up on it)

        1. wirelyre
          Link Parent
          Conventional real-time graphics rendering consists of the mathematics necessary to draw shapes. The scene is described by polygons in space, and then various transformations turn the vertices to...

          Conventional real-time graphics rendering consists of the mathematics necessary to draw shapes. The scene is described by polygons in space, and then various transformations turn the vertices to polygons on your flat screen, render the polygons to pixels, and finally manipulate the pixels to achieve graphical effects.

          Ray tracing is a different beast. Every pixel on screen needs to explore the scene in full, because light behaves in odd, non-linear ways. For example, diffuse reflections bounce off of dull surfaces at a large range of angles (and each of these angles needs to be explored for a light source to determine the light intensity); but past a particular angle, it may be that a nearby object fully occludes all such reflections.

          Rasterization lends itself to small, logical operations with clearly defined scopes. Ray tracing does not.

          10 votes
        2. Emerald_Knight
          Link Parent
          Ray tracing is basically the simulation of actual rays of light and how they interact with objects and the environment in order to more accurately simulate light. Think about just how many rays of...

          Ray tracing is basically the simulation of actual rays of light and how they interact with objects and the environment in order to more accurately simulate light. Think about just how many rays of light you would have to simulate simultaneously and that should give you an idea of how much work this is. Many games try to "pre-render" as much of this light as possible around the static objects lying around, that way you don't have to keep performing these expensive simulations over and over again, instead limiting it to a few moving objects.

          This is really over-simplified, but should hopefully make things a little more clear.

          6 votes
    2. Pilgrim
      Link Parent
      I just adore this blogger. His point is typically to dive deep into older technology for the pure joy of it. I honestly don't know, lol. I was just enjoying reading about the history of it.

      I'm not entirely sure what the point of the article is.

      I just adore this blogger. His point is typically to dive deep into older technology for the pure joy of it.

      I haven't been following the gaming press lately, but I assume the reason we're talking about this is that it can now be done in realtime?

      I honestly don't know, lol. I was just enjoying reading about the history of it.

      5 votes
    3. quan7hum
      Link Parent
      I made my first renders and 3d animations with POV-Ray in secondary school back in the nineties. Raytracing certainly is not a new thing. Realtime raytracing though is something I'd very much like...

      I made my first renders and 3d animations with POV-Ray in secondary school back in the nineties. Raytracing certainly is not a new thing. Realtime raytracing though is something I'd very much like to see already.

      3 votes
  2. Pilgrim
    Link
    Something to whet your teeth on:

    Something to whet your teeth on:

    In the world of modern PC graphics hardware, all the buzz right now is about a rendering technique call ray tracing

    This is big news for gamers because ray tracing allows for a much more realistic rendering of light and it’s real-world behavior within a 3D scene. Or…it will be as, presently, only a few games have been updated to utilize the rendering features that DXR brings to the table. And there aren’t a lot of GPUs out there yet with hardware designed with DXR in mind, directly targeting the acceleration of ray tracing calculations. Even still, it seems that ray tracing has become the new hotness and it’s even driven some observers fairly well out of their mind. It’s what’s new in tech.

    Or is it?