Intel Hopes to Boost Cloud Gaming With Ray Tracing

A new technology from Intel called ray tracing could bring lifelike images and improved 3D effects to games on tablets and other mobile devices.

The chip maker is creating chips and rewriting games to use ray tracing, which generates accurate images by tracing paths of light and could lead to console-like gaming via the cloud, the company said in a podcast this week.

[kookie]

The thing i like about ray tracing is that you can have a fully round circle in gaming.

[BK-201]

thats impossible.

[wicko]

Well there is still rounding being done to render it onscreen, but technically it is doable.

Attached is a screen of a ray tracer i wrote 3-4 years ago for a university project, which is rendering perfect spheres.

Fun fact: It took about 5 seconds for a ~2ghz P4 to render one frame.

Edit: higher res http://i220.photobucket.com...

[B1663r]

I doubt that they would change that part of the rendering pipeline the "spheres" would still be made out of a bunch of little triangles and normal smoothing, instead of some sort of quadratic equation used to define shapes... Like they did way back before they realized they didn't need perfect spheres...

Rather than as a 3d rasterizer, specialized ray tracing hardware would be awsome for physics engines, as all your little particles need to do a bunch of ray casts for collision modeling.

So intel want to make a spcialized core just to do the raycasts, I am all for it. Maybe it would have some utility as a special purpose shader, so you only did raytrace effects on some materials.

But I seriously doubt there is ~any~ advantage to using a raytracer as the rasterizer at this late date.

[fr0sty]

Since when is ray tracing a new technology? It's been around for decades.

[xAlmostPro]

@fr0sty read the article or maybe even the description?.. this is for tablets and mobile devices via a cloud

[fr0sty]

That doesn't change the fact that the description clearly calls ray tracing a new technology, which it is not.

[Kakkoii]

GPU accelerated tessellation takes care of that.. Ray-tracing is irrelevant when it comes to that.

[yewles1]

"A new technology from Intel called ray tracing"

*bangs head on desk*

[carreirabr]

PR people... you know...

[B1663r]

Wasn't there a big effort to get away from ray tracing becaise it was much more inefficient than triangle rasterizers??? Like way back in the 80's???

[TABSF]

@ B1663r

Ray Tracing is not so much an issues these days.

I've only seen real-time ray tracing done on PC above 24fps. It was done with GTX 480 in SLi

Intel system is very inefficient though.

CPU is failing
GPU is winning

GPGPU is the future, Cuda 4.0 is another step in that direction and Kepler will be another.

Until quantum CPUs of course. Hey it may even be quantum GPUs LOL.

[B1663r]

Well gpu isn't as fast as vector processing because it doesn't do all the branch prediction and what not...

Also, I suspect we will have optical computers before fully making the switch to quantum computers.

[ATiElite]

So brand spanking just just right this second NEW that Ray tracing has only been around oh I don't know since....1987.

Quake Wars enemy Territory was ray-Traced in 2008-2009. But the level of computer power needed was ungodly.

Caneland server system with four Dunnington hexa-core CPUs, 2.66 GHz: 20 - 35 fps

Caneland server system with four Tigerton quad-core CPUs, 2.93 GHz: 15 - 20 fps

Workstation system with two Nehalem quad-core CPUs, 3.2 GHz: 15 - 20 fps

But not many ppl know that the AMD HD5000 and Nvidia 400 series can now do Ray-Tracing as the GPU can do the heavy calculations faster than a CPU. Cpu's with the GPU on the same die will help greatly with Ray Tracing.

The AMD HD6000 and Nvidia 500 Gtx series are more capable to handle Ray-Tracing but the amount of programming is still very difficult but the scopes in BF3 reflect the world in real time which can be seen in the BF3 game play trailer.

[Pedobear Rocks]

I did ray tracing on my Atari ST....

[WhiteNoise]

lol, if you go down the bottom of that article there is a question that says 'would you recommend this article'

20 said yes, 133 said no....

How the hell can a PC website be so dumb about tech :S

[LOLconsoles]

Ray tracing isn't new tech....

[Capdastaro]

No but implementing it real time efficiently is.

[Kakkoii]

No, it's not actually. Many companies have already done it. There are quite a few semi-real-time full ray-trace engines out there that use the GPU. And Caustic Graphics specialized hardware does it in real time.

Intel is trying to please it's worried investors who see Nvidia gaining huge ground over them in many different aspects of computing. But this will ultimately fail unless Intel creates a radically new architecture more akin to a GPU, but still with the features of a modern CPU. Something Nvidia is already well on it's way towards.

[xAlmostPro]

Wow..

It's new for tablets and mobile devices(which it clearly states)from a cloud

[Fishy Fingers]

Wow... If only we'd heard of this futuristic technique before.

[TABSF]

Whether its

PCWorld.co.uk or
PCWorld.com

There will allows be a fail in there somewhere.