Ray Tracing and i7

[AdamAnubis]

I've been reading a few of customs pc's articles on ray tracing, and for 20fps it takes 16 Xeon Cores. Pretty beastly then. However, i was thinking, what with larrabee and the new i7 cores coming out, could raytracing be closer than we think?
If any of the benchmarks and rumours of i7 are to be believed, its going to be epic. (anandtech and toms hardware )

Do you think this might bring it closer? I'm not saying like instantly, but by the time they have rolled out their top end i7's, it will be truely epic, considering their entry levels are beating E8500's. And if you begin to overclock and let the platforms mature... Whether they can beat Xeons, im not sure, but still...I'm extremely excited!!

P.S Any idea if Hexus are gonna get their hands on some i7 hardware?

[prehensile]

There's some news about live 25fps raytracing demos on a custom quake 4 build on toms hw some time ago,

the main point is that an optimised algorith, like the mp3/divx of raytracing, divides the work of the processor by ten.

also it was on a normal desktop machine, and the timeline for gaming raytracing is about 2010.

also the gpu in the algorythm was mnuch more crucial than cpu, with at least 1gb gfx ram and a 4870 class card can do live raytracing at 25fps, and cards in 2010 should handle it easily.

[prehensile]

this is the video footage of it on a desktop machinee, but the b***srds for some reason it's impossible to obtain a HD video of it, so if anyone finds an hd copy, you're amazing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsCgJhoAm0c

[Zhaoman]

Ray tracing is possible now but it wouldn't make any noticeable difference on the games today. For ray-tracing to truly come into its own, games have to be modelled in ultra-detail (ie like movies) where rasterisation would be too basic a technique for such a detailed environment. But that comes with development consequences which, imho, means that ray-tracing in games is a long, long way off.

[AdamAnubis]

Haha, the same day i post this and they actually benchmark it, typical ^^

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=15015

I did this earlier in the week with teh PC game topic. Great minds think alike

What do you think the TOP end i7's will be? Will we see octa-cores?

[Funkstar]

We won't see 8 cores with i7, not according to this piece on Engadget anyway

http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/16/l...struction-set/

8-cores will need the smaller 32nm production process, and we won't see it straight away because of their tick-tock release schedule. Tich is a process improvement, tock is an architecture improvement.

EDIT: A little more detail in the article linked from Engadget: http://www.electronista.com/articles...10.leaked.map/

[j.o.s.h.1408]

quad core is considered to be a overkill atm anyway so 8 core is still a long way to go before that appears in our desktop mainstream pc's

[Crevan]

We'll see at least 8 cores in Larrabee if/when it comes out. Since those are gonna be x86 cores anyway, there's not much difference to the cpus =)

In terms of ray-tracing, as Zhaoman already mentioned, game-makers will have to improve their technology to use it, and that means writing loads of new code, and spending much more time on actual design and creation of visuals. It's very expensive, and very risky. We shouldn't expect it any time soon.

[kalniel]

We'll see at least 8 cores in Larrabee if/when it comes out. Since those are gonna be x86 cores anyway, there's not much difference to the cpus =)

In terms of ray-tracing, as Zhaoman already mentioned, game-makers will have to improve their technology to use it, and that means writing loads of new code, and spending much more time on actual design and creation of visuals. It's very expensive, and very risky. We shouldn't expect it any time soon.

Design and creation of visuals won't be too different - art assets are already fully modelled objects in 3d - in fact some time might be taken out of it as a lot of the effort currently is in reducing the polygon count and fancy techniques to hide this (normal maps from high poly models etc.) If you can just use high polys in the first place it's a lot quicker. The time will come mostly just from the engine/lighting side, but typically you wouldn't expect to re-invent the wheel everytime, instead you'd buy a middleware engine.

[Crevan]

Could be, you probably know more about ray-tracing It's just that I've read somewhere that it would have to use special surface modelling techniques with splines rather than polygons. Might be a load of crap, though.

Just a few days ago Nvidia actually presented a tech-demo at Siggraph expo, running a ray-traced model of a car or something, with 2 million polygons, anti-aliased, 30fps@1920x1080. The only problem is that it was run on a 3U sized beast with 4 Quardo FX cards and 4 gigs of memory, which isn't even available for sale until autumn.

Somehow 4870 doing ray-tracing doesn't sound too realistic. Unless it's a much more simple scene at 640x480, or something.

EDIT: Ah, just as I wrote this, Hexus posted about Nvidia's presentation =)