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.
will they incorpirate this into the ps3 and x-box 360, it said 2007 that means devs would learn about it and so and so and ith would be released probably in 2009.
so its ok i guess.
And two people read it!!
Sorry, but you did post this in every article though.
goood stuff, this and the fantasy engine ( i think is the name ).. where light bounces and stuff... is the technology i've been waiting for, for games to actually be "next gen"
this technique is higly unlikely to be used in games on ps3 and xbox 360. The reason is that it renders the complete hardware design useless. The architecture of the ps3 and the xbox 360 are targeted towards scanline rendering. You cant render Raytracing in Hardware on those platforms. You could emulate a software raytracer with those hardware only. Means you will instantly loose Anti Aliasing, Bilinear/Trilinear/Anisotropic Filtering except you programm them yourself (in software). Raytracing should come at some point because its speed scales linear with the number of processors. But right now it is still the case that Scanline rendering done on specialized hardware can do pretty similar visuals with higher speeds.
And one of the laws of computer graphic programming for games is: "If it looks right it IS right". We dont need no physically correct algorithms if the ones we produce the same appearance only cheaper.
look at how scarce feedback this insightful article has gotten, compared to the previous articles, which did naught but inflame fanboy bickering. this is truly a sad time for gaming.