Intel Researchers Consider Ray-Tracing for Mobile Devices 120
An anonymous reader points out an Intel blog discussing the feasibility of Ray-Tracing on mobile hardware. The required processing power is reduced enough by the lower resolution on these devices that they could realistically run Ray-Traced games. We've discussed the basics of Ray-Tracing in the past. Quoting:
"Moore's Law works in favor of Ray-Tracing, because it assures us that computers will get faster - much faster - while monitor resolutions will grow at a much slower pace. As computational capabilities outgrow computational requirements, the quality of rendering Ray-Tracing in real time will improve, and developers will have an opportunity to do more than ever before. We believe that with Ray-Tracing, developers will have an opportunity to deliver more content in less time, because when you render things in a physically correct environment, you can achieve high levels of quality very quickly, and with an engine that is scalable from the Ultra-Mobile to the Ultra-Powerful, Ray-Tracing may become a very popular technology in the upcoming years."
Good for Intel, needs more work (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Summary is misleading (Score:2, Interesting)
What does Pixar have to do with realtime graphics? (Score:3, Interesting)
Pixar has the luxury of controlling every take, and going back after the fact to re-render shots with different settings, or even to use different algorithms (including ray-tracing) to fix any rendoring flaws caused by whatever approximations they're using at that point. Realtime graphics do not have that luxury... if there's a problem in a scene, you can't go back and fix it.
So whether raytracing is more or less appropriate for realtime graphics, whether Pixar uses it or not is irrelevant.
Can't wait for my contacts list at sunset! (Score:3, Interesting)
A popular technology? Like a working filesystem? They're real popular I hear. Or an on off button that actually works.
Slow news day + intel graphics dept astroturfing = ray tracing on phones is news.
Re:Inverse Moore's Law (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Raytracing is not the holy grail of graphics (Score:3, Interesting)
Ray tracing alone is not a silver a bullet but if it produces better results with less human effort, it's a net win.
I found this on Pixar's RenderMan page (https://renderman.pixar.com/products/tools/renderman.html):
"Ray Tracing and Global Illumination
The ray tracing and global illumination features have been integrated with Pixar's highly evolved implementation of the REYES "scanline" rendering algorithm so that you only incur the overhead associated with these effects when and where you need them. RenderMan shader developers can selectively invoke RenderMan's new ray tracing subsystem to invent new solutions to difficult production problems or to achieve physically correct illumination effects."
My interpretation: If you can't figure out how to manually tweak the scene, throw CPU power at it.
photon mapping (Score:3, Interesting)
Photon mapping is a pretty good way of getting an unbiased approximation to the rendering equation. It's slower than plain ray tracing, but much faster than path tracing. Real-time interactive global illumination isn't as computationally intractable as you are implying; it is likely to follow real-time ray tracing in not too many years.
Ray casting and Java (Score:3, Interesting)
And this is just for Ray Casting which is much simpler than Ray Tracing.
During my development with Java I discovered that setting a pixel color to 0xFF000000 caused a slowdown. That's right, a black pixel would slow the framerate down. I had to set all pure black pixels to not quite black pixels.
http://www.dawnofthegeeks.com/index.php?page=blog&offset=58 [dawnofthegeeks.com]
I also found that Java is much slower at doing a "v++" than C.
Those quirks aren't a big deal when you're not trying to do a lot of math. But they will cripple a Ray Tracer. If Sun could optimize Java better it might be viable but for now Ray Tracing based games would have to be written at a lower level even with a small resolution.
Maybe people don't expect enough out of handhelds to notice that the graphics are "poor" and that they could be better. In that case you could probably get away with Java. People don't expect much out of a console until someone starts really pushing the limit and then everyone has to.
Re:Raytracing is not the holy grail of graphics (Score:2, Interesting)
Definitely.
Pixar used some raytracing for Cars and later described it as a huge mistake. Certain shots took over 200 hours per frame. In terms of performance vs. quality, even in movies, they prefer to go scanline. You won't see games going to raytracing any time soon.
In Transformers, they used cube-maps because raytracing was too slow. Is anyone here seriously going to make the case that Transformers looked bad because the reflections weren't perfect?