
‘Ray tracing’ could bring the biggest graphics jump in a decade - jonbaer
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/8/20/17698314/nvidia-volta-gpu-ray-tracing-graphics
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Fjolsvith
I used to play around with the POVRay ray tracer and make some phenomenal
scenes (although they took hours and sometimes days to generate). If they get
that going in real-time, holy mackerel, the games will be phenomenal!

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perilunar
Once we have real-time ray tracing, is there anywhere further to go, or is
graphics pretty much done after that?

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flafla2
This headline would have been true in 1989... not quite today.

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Sohcahtoa82
Your comment baffles me.

In 1989, we were nowhere CLOSE to real-time ray-tracing. Even real-time
textured triangle-based rendering was beyond our capabilities. We just didn't
have the necessary memory bandwidth or CPU power.

Around the year 2000, we had a couple graphics demos that featured real-time
ray-tracing (like Nature Suxx), but they were quite limited.

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philipkglass
AT&T Pixel Machines PXM 900 Series

[http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/pixel_machine/Pixel_Machine_Bro...](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/att/pixel_machine/Pixel_Machine_Brochure_1987.pdf)

"The PXM 900 Series uses 32 bit floating-point processors exclusively. So
floating-point-intensive algorithms -- like those used for image processing
and ray-tracing -- can be implemented directly at the frame buffer level for
real-time processing."

[http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/ray-tracing-gems-
book-...](http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/ray-tracing-gems-book-call-
for-participation/)

"As far as “considered unattainable for decades” goes, interactive ray tracing
has been attained long ago, just not for (non-trivial) video games or other
interactive applications. My first encounter with an interactive ray tracer
was AT&T’s Pixel Machine back in 1987. I had put out the Standard Procedural
Databases on Usenet the week before SIGGRAPH, and was amazed to see that they
had grabbed them and were rendering some in just a few seconds. But the real
excitement was a little postage-stamp (well, maybe 6 stamps) sized rendering,
where you could interactively use a mouse to control a shiny sphere’s position
atop a Mandrill plane texture."

The only reason I remember that this hardware existed is that it was mentioned
in the book I first learned C programming from.

