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Ray Tracing To Debut in DirectX 11

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:01 AM
from the directx-11-is-confusing-to-my-brain dept.
Graphics Software
crazyeyes writes "This is breaking news. Microsoft has not only decided to support ray tracing in DirectX 11, but they will also be basing it on Intel's x86 ray-tracing technology and get this ... it will be out by the end of the year! In this article, we will examine what ray tracing is all about and why it would be superior to the current raster-based technology. As for performance, well, let Intel dazzle you with some numbers. Here's a quote from the article: 'You need not worry about your old raster-based DirectX 10 or older games or graphics cards. DirectX 11 will continue to support rasterization. It just includes support for ray-tracing as well. There will be two DirectX 11 modes, based on support by the application and the hardware.'"
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Submission: Ray Tracing To Debut in DirectX 11 by crazyeyes (1091733)
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  • But I am really annoyed that April Fool's has now become a multi-day event.

  • Poster is really excited (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pembo13 (770295) on Monday March 31 2008, @10:04AM (#22921234) Homepage
    If one's thing sure. Pity DirectX11 will work on so few platforms.
    • I haven't really been in the 3d-graphics-API scene for awhile, so I'm wondering what's available for OpenGL raytracing. There are a bunch of plugins etc for 3d-rendering that I remember, such as POVRay, etc, but how about realtime?

      Anyone know if there's anything available/in-the-works?

      • Re:OpenGL (Score:5, Informative)

        by Yetihehe (971185) on Monday March 31 2008, @10:41AM (#22921678)
        There is now only OpenRT which have Open only fro similarity with OpenGL (it is fully proprietary implementation, but has API similar to that of OpenGL).
      • a) OpenGL is an immediate-mode API - it doesn't store a "scene" it just processes a single polygon at a time.

        b) You can't raytrace something unless you have access to the whole scene.

        QED.

  • Surprisingly forward thinking on MS' part (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Froze (398171) on Monday March 31 2008, @10:05AM (#22921236) Homepage
    Or maybe just obvious to anyone in the industry. Since clock speeds are bounded and not getting any faster and you can only lower voltages so much before signals get lost in the noise, the only way forward is in parallelism and ray tracing is wondrously parallelifyable (is that a real word?).
  • If this isn't an April Fools joke- maybe they could get DX-10 to work first, before worrying about DX-11?(!)

  • Looks like a shun to current GPUs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Monday March 31 2008, @10:12AM (#22921322) Homepage Journal
    It says nvidia will be locked out because DirectX11 raytracing will be based on x86.
    Wasn't DirectX meant to be a generic middleman to allow developers to abstract away from the specific implementations?

    Isn't this a backwards step that basically cuts anyone developing for it out of using the code on other systems (and I am meaning even the xbox 360).
  • DX10 is Vista-only. I'm going to guess DX11 will be the same. Which means I'll never see it in action, as I will switch to Linux before I switch to Vista.

  • An interesting read on this very subject here [pcper.com]. Quote:

    "I have my own personal hobby horse in this race and have some fairly firm opinions on the way things are going right now. I think that ray tracing in the classical sense, of analytically intersecting rays with conventionally defined geometry, whether they be triangle meshes or higher order primitives, I'm not really bullish on that taking over for primary rendering tasks which is essentially what Intel is pushing."

    Carmack admits he has his own personal preference, but generally he's pretty sensible about these things. He's usually called it correctly in the past when people have pushed various technologies that were supposed to take over the world, and they've fallen by the wayside.

    Hopefully he'll chime into this latest article with some further thoughts.

    • That article was also discussed on Slashdot [slashdot.org].
    • PC Perspective also features an article [pcper.com] written in January on the impact of ray tracing in games. It provides many pictures of what it will look like and what the benefits are vs rasterization. It's written by Daniel Pohl, a research scientist at Intel.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Azarael (896715)
        There's this one from PC Perspective as well which is an interview with NVidia's Tech Director:
        http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=530/ [pcper.com]

        His view on ray tracing is pretty much summed up by:

        David Kirk, NVIDIA: I'm not sure which specific advantages you are referring to, but I can cover some common misconceptions that are promulgated by the CPU ray tracing community. Some folks make the argument that rasterization is inherently slower because you must process and attempt to draw every triangle (even invisible

  • ... will be ensured by using ray tracing to render characters in your word processing application! Finally, Vista will get some love.
  • Out by end of the year in MICROSOFT TIME means OUT BY 2011 - Q4. Maybe.

  • "I'll be interested in discussing a bigger question, though: 'When will hardware graphics pipelines become sufficiently programmable to efficiently implement ray tracing and other global illumination techniques?'. I believe that the answer is now, and more so from now on! As GPUs become increasingly programmable, the variety of algorithms that can be mapped onto the computing substrate of a GPU becomes ever broader.

    As part of this quest, I routinely ask artists and programmers at movie and special effects studios what features and flexibility they will need to do their rendering on GPUs, and they say that they could never render on hardware! What do they use now: crayons? Actually, they use hardware now, in the form of programmable general-purpose CPUs. I believe that the future convergence of realistic and real-time rendering lies in highly programmable special-purpose GPUs."
    Very interesting. A couple of years later he was arguing against special purpose GPUs for ray tracing, and for the use of "General Purpose GPUs", and the new nVidia 8xxx series seem to be following that path... away from dedicated rendering pipelines and towards a GPU that's more like a highly parallel CPU.

    More comments from David Kirk. [scarydevil.com]

    I would be very interested in what he learned between 2002 and 2004 that led him to argue so eloquently against Phillip Slusallek. I'd also like to know what Professor Slusallek is doing at nVidia, where he's "working with the research group on the future of realtime ray tracing" [linkedin.com].

  • Some less breathless articles (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jmichaelg (148257) on Monday March 31 2008, @10:23AM (#22921478)
    Intel has this article [intel.com] about the hardware needed to run at 50fps at 1920x1080p. They're claiming you need 8 cores. In a couple of years, that could well be within reach for most gamers.

    There's also this John Carmack Interview [pcper.com]. Carmack isn't too optimistic about ray tracing replacing rasterized graphics.
    • SaarCOR [uni-sb.de] was getting about 10 FPS for Quake3 with a minimal FPGA-based implementation of a hardware raytracer running at less than 100 MHz with a fraction of the gate budget of a modern GPU... in 2005. Raytracing is highly scalable - it's an "embarrassingly parallelizable" problem - so if nVidia is really working on raytracing hardware they could well be able to beat Intel to the punch.

  • It also obviates the need for the GPU which has stolen much of the limelight in recent years.

    So that $250 EVGA 8800GTS [newegg.com] I just bought soon will be used for a doorstop? I haven't even checked out the DX10 with it, I'm still kicking DX9. I may test out the vista x64 ultimate and see how crysis runs there as opposed to xp, which I doubt will be that dramatic. I somehow don't see gpus disappearing when dx11 premieres since not many people will actually have 8 or 16 core cpus.

    As DirectX 11 is a work in progress,

  • Major breakthrough for Business Software (Score:5, Funny)

    by Thanshin (1188877) on Monday March 31 2008, @10:32AM (#22921584)
    Raytracing allows the implementation of mirrors in 3d environments.

    Finally all business software will have the feature of showing the cause of most problems. (See also "Error Id: 10T" and PEBKAC)
  • DX11, like DX10, will probably be Vista-only. So, will Intel build OpenGL support, roll their own API, or tie the success or failure of their graphics architecture to Vista?
  • I'll hold on to Imagine [wikipedia.org] for my Amiga until it's pried from my cold, dead hands.

    34.2 minutes per rendered frame gives me plenty of time to do other things around the house.

    Actually, I would have mentioned Turbo Silver instead if there were any good links for it.

  • Thankyou GOD! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cathoderoytube (1088737) on Monday March 31 2008, @11:39AM (#22922356)
    I thought PC gaming was in the throes of death. Fortunately now PC game developers will be able to use Ray Tracing instead of implementing the much ballyhooed 'fun' that graphically inferior console games seem to be touting.

  • Fuck raytracing... How about ANTI ALIASING! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jackie_Chan_Fan (730745) on Monday March 31 2008, @12:29PM (#22922930)
    All of this talk about raytracing, and we still do not have high quality anti aliased renders with existing real time rendering methods.

    Games still look like shit. NONE of them can even compare to the nice anti aliased images generated by software renderers.

    Anti Aliasing is all fine and dandy, but when a game looks like shit, these days its due to anti aliasing. We can do plenty of visually stunning things in realitime but no matter what you do, it still looks like a video game because the damn hardware cant render high resolution enough with high quality anti aliasing enabled.

    How in the hell will raytracing solve that? :) It's just going to eat more pixel ponies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    Look at Gran Turismo on PS3. All of their PR videos have anti aliasing enabled and the game looks photoreal. However the reality is they're lying in their screenshots. The game itself does not use anti aliasing, thus making it look like a videogame. With Anti aliasing enabled, its photoreal, without, it looks like shit.

    This is an old problem, which the hardware companies have addressed... they just cant deliver on performance.

    But they can on raytracing? No thanks. Anti aliasing in ray tracing renderers is even slower. I dont care how accurate the reflects are, if its aliased to shit... it will never look convincing.

    • Re:To Tech ARP... (Score:4, Funny)

      by F-3582 (996772) on Monday March 31 2008, @10:20AM (#22921432)
      Yep, like Microsoft's:

      Who told you this? We have been monitoring your articles based on leaked Microsoft information and like this one, they are ALL incorrect. Please let us know who your source is so we can correct him. (Editor : Or fire him???) Note that we have notified our legal department and the FBI as all Microsoft internal documents are not meant to be taken out of the building. They will be in touch shortly. Please extend all courtesies in cooperating with their investigation. (Editor : Good luck! We are in Malaysia!)


      By the way: It is already April 1st over there.

    • I own Vista. I got it for free through an MS promo (no, not the "TPB promo"). It's not great news for me, since all my games run much better in XP than Vista and I rarely boot into Vista anymore.

    • I think you made a minor math error....

      ....You forgot to carry the one a hundred million times or so.

    • How does it differ from regular X11?

      Must be something to do with direct rendering. Which reminds me, there's nothing new about Vista's DRM, after all you need the DRM module to get accelerated 3D in Linux/X11 ;)

    • Re:Only available with Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Vigile (99919) * on Monday March 31 2008, @10:45AM (#22921736)
      This is very obviously a lie or joke for early April fools. I didn't know Slashdot fell for them. Did anyone actually read the last page?

      • Re:Only available with Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Shade of Pyrrhus (992978) on Monday March 31 2008, @11:08AM (#22922052)
        Yeah, for anyone who reads up to the last page, it seems pretty clear that it's not true. Something like this would be more likely announced by Microsoft PR a good while before release, in order to grow some hype.

        TFA states

        "As DirectX 11 is a work in progress, Microsoft does not have an exact timeline. But the source claims that DirectX 11 could be part of Windows Vista by late 2008."
        I don't know where these guys get their information, but even Microsoft does planning ahead of time for products they create - especially if it's to be released the same year! The absurdity climaxes at the third page...do yourself a favor and read it for a little laugh.

        "They also plan to have DirectX 11 ready in time to debut with Windows Vista Service Pack 2"
        Service Pack 2? Sure, SP1 wasn't an improvement and SP2 might be needed - but, again, plans for this would have been more well announced or planned by Microsoft.

        Sorry guys, article is simply BS.

        • Re:Only available with Windows 7 (Score:5, Insightful)

          by kestasjk (933987) on Monday March 31 2008, @11:56AM (#22922554) Homepage
          Is it just me or is this a stupid April fools joke? It's not funny, it's like it's just trying to get your hopes up.

          Ugh.. Get ready for a whole day of hilariously deceptive articles like this..

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by vikstar (615372)
            Anyone who has knows a bit about computer graphics will suspect this is a joke from the heading itself, and then when you look at the ray-traced image comparison all doubt is removed (especially because it seems to use global illumination). I was just upset they didn't spend more time on it. The joke could've been much better, showing realistic-looking specs, small rendering times etc.

    • That's a lie. (Score:5, Funny)

      by pavon (30274) on Monday March 31 2008, @12:42PM (#22923064)
      This can't be Windows 7 only - Linux has had Direct X11 [wikipedia.org] for years. This is yet another case of Microsoft playing catchup.

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