

Intel converts ET: Quake Wars to ray-tracing - hhm
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37925-113.html

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pmjordan
This is good stuff. I really hope raytracing starts taking off. Current GPUs
are blazing fast at heavily pipelined rasterising, but that particular model
of rendering is incredibly awkward. Most effects have to be "truncated"
because every level of indirection incurs a huge cost: you can only render to
texture, use the result to render to another texture, etc. so many times - the
latency kills you and you're often wasting cycles repeating the same
calculation over and over. Complexity increases disproportionately with every
added effect.

There's been some success with getting ray tracing working on current GPUs,
but it's pretty inefficient due to the architectual assumptions. A large
number of simple CPU cores with their own decoding units (as opposed to GPU
cores, which run in lock-step in groups) are much more convenient for ray-
tracing. Intel may well be on the right track here.

I doubt nVidia has been sleeping though, and AMD are known to be working on a
GPU/CPU fusion project...

It wouldn't surprise me if the next PlayStation had hardware support for ray-
tracing instead of a classical CPU. Of course, we'll have to wait a while for
that. Microsoft won't do it because they have too much invested in Direct3D,
and Nintendo, uh... yeah. I don't think so.

