[NEWS] NVIDIA Acquires RayScale Software

[Mr.Guvernment]

So some say, will NVIDIA give the fight against intel... saying CPU's are dead?


http://www.techpowerup.com/60926/NVIDIA_Acquires_RayScale_Software.html


NVIDIA Acquires RayScale Software
PC Perspective sends word to us that during a meeting in San Jose, NVIDIA has announced that it is to aquire a ray tracing software company called RayScale. Interesting acquisition indeed, but little is known at the moment. There's still no press release issued. RayScale starts its life from the University of Utah, and currently it provides interactive ray tracing and photo-realistic rendering solutions. Ray tracing is a technique for rendering three-dimensional graphics with very complex light interactions. More info about RayScale can be found on their web page here.

[Colton H]

Didn't really read in-depth of what Ray tracing is but, will it make gaming more "life like" with better performance meaning higher FPS than what is available at the moment?

[Farinorco]

Didn't really read in-depth of what Ray tracing is but, will it make gaming more "life like" with better performance meaning higher FPS than what is available at the moment?

I don't think so. The thing is that ray tracing is a technique with a so high complexity that it doesn't worth it for real time rendering. Let's see if I'm able to explain it.

If you have a certain X computational power, now you can use it to render a image through ray tracing, or to render the same image through rasterization, imitating most of visual effects of ray tracing with an acceptable level of accuracy at a much minor computational cost, and then use all the computational power left to add other effects and IQ improvements.

More or less, you could say that you always can do more things in less (same) time with rasterization than ray tracing, don't mind the available computational power. Ray tracing is only a good option (superior) when you take rendering time out from the equation (that's it, when you're talking about pre-rendered 3d animations, for example). Of course that's never the case when talking about real time rendering (that's what implies the "real time" part).

Even so, ray tracing could have an indirect use in real time rendering. For example John Carmack explained that they (id software) are working in some kind of hybrid technology mixing rasterization and some kind of basic ray tracing, I don't remember exactly what they are trying to achieve with this, but I remember that he said that it wouldn't have the things that people usually associate to ray tracing (more realistic lighting and so) because that's what adds most of the extra and unworthy complexity.

Probably nVidia's initiative has more to do with that kind of research path than with trying to implement a real time ray tracing renderer, but if I tell you the truth, I don't even read the link yet... :rolleyes:

EDIT: Link read. Not very informative, for sure...

[Neural Net]

I thought it had been decided that radiosity was more suitable for use in game rendering and not ray tracing? I know a few game engines have been made that use radiosity such as Enlighten (http://www.geomerics.com/enlighten-media.htm) but I haven't heard of any ray tracing game engines yet.

[Farinorco]

I thought it had been decided that radiosity was more suitable for use in game rendering and not ray tracing? I know a few game engines have been made that use radiosity such as Enlighten (http://www.geomerics.com/enlighten-media.htm) but I haven't heard of any ray tracing game engines yet.

Variants of radiosity, ambient occlusion and so are techniques that may be used in a raster rendering to imitate (with more or less precision) the lighting/shadowing effects of ray tracing rendering at a much lower computational cost. So: yes, they are a possibility in real time rendering.

[nightelph]

I saw article too. My take on nVidia's decision is that they don't want to be left out of the game, and they're going to toy around with RT for now. If it takes off, they'll be ready. However thats a BIG step, and one I don't think we'll see anytime soon. PcPer has a couple of good articles (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=334) on ray tracing.

[Hipcrostino]

games with true ray tracing, and therefore truly SIMULATED shadows, lighting, reflections opacity etc etc (and not the current emulatation) will be a long way off. It takes the best cpus and gpus in the world mintutes, if not hours to render a single frame with proper ray tracing. 25 times a second is a way off. But of course we will see otherways of doing it, as farinorco stated. It will also lead to more efficiant design of the code and as hardware speeds up, one day it will work, just not for a long while.

There are some tech demos out that use ray tracing though (in quake 3 think).

[Shiggity]

The next few years will definately be interesting.