Intel Shows Off Quake Wars, Ray Traced 368
An anonymous reader writes "At the Research@Intel Day 2008, Intel showed a ray-traced version of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Compared to the original game, a water with reflections and refractions and a physically correct glass shader were added. Also, a camera portal with up to 200 recursions to itself has been demonstrated. To show off this ongoing research in the topic of real-time ray tracing, a four-socket system with quad cores has been used that allowed rendering the enhanced visual effects in 1280x720 at 14-29 fps. Just two years before, early versions of Quake 4: Ray Traced ran only at 256x256 with 17 fps. Even though Intel's upcoming Larrabee will be primarily a rasterizer, the capabilities for also doing ray tracing on it should deliver interesting opportunities."
Voxels? (Score:4, Interesting)
Height maps (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Height maps (Score:5, Interesting)
Back then, most of my hardware-control loops used self-modifying bits and bobs... sometimes to save a byte, sometimes to avoid a fetch. A few times I used true self-modifying code where the outer loops would reprogram the inner loops on-the-fly. It was the most CPU-efficient way to do realtime multichannel sound synthesis on a 486, and of course it gave me the opportunity to refer to it as a dynamic synth compiler
All that lovely code died a quick, silent death when Windows 95 came along. It wreaked all sorts of havoc and Windows would kill the app as soon as it tried to self-mod. It's a shame I didn't keep up with the skills, I could be one rich despicable virus writer today
It's times like this I miss the 90's, I still have that 386 programming manual somewhere safe.
Re:Height maps (Score:5, Insightful)
Now children rule the internet, and programming is a dead end job.
What a shitty decade this is.
Re:Height maps (Score:4, Funny)
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All that lovely code died a quick, silent death when Windows 95 came along. It wreaked all sorts of havoc and Windows would kill the app as soon as it tried to self-mod. It's a shame I didn't keep up with the skills, I could be one rich despicable virus writer today :)
Actually, to use self modifying code in win32, you just have to mark the PE code sections as writable, since by default they're just readable and executable.
And self modifying code is still used today on some software protections, not just viruses.
Re:Height maps (Score:5, Informative)
Embedded programming and GBA (Score:3, Interesting)
Why? (Score:5, Funny)
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Simply put, a GPU is fast because it can stream data at speeds > 1900Mhz. In comparison, a quad core intel machine with memory speeds of 800Mhz can't feed the cores with data fast enough. In my own tests, if you can keep the data requirements p
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I loves me a good plot, with rich writing and character development, but I also loves me some 27" max-detail graphical virtuosity. Mass Effect is getting a lot of love from me right now, because it delivers a healthy balance of plot and visuals.
Crysis, of course, is a rather sexual experience at 1920x1200. Every now and then I'll perch myself atop a cliff and gaze at the breathtaking imagery... then I go back into cloak mode and snipe the mofos back to hell! I'm not a big FPS fan, but Crysis is one of the few titles that give me a sense of immersion, like I'm actually a gun wielding superhero instead of some synthetic alien cannon fodder.
Would I play Crysis if it looked like ass ? Probably not, because that particular experience hinges on the realistic graphics and all the fine details.
Would I play Quake if it looked like ass ? Hell yes, I would! In fact I did, it was called Quake 1-2-3... They're ghetto by today's standards, but the action was solid and I happily pissed away countless hours railing goddamned teenagers on instagib maps. Just give me a pixel to shoot at and I'm set!
I'm trying to think of a gorgeous game that sucked... memory is failing me right now, but there have been many. Actually, at the risk of getting flamed to death, I'd say Oblivion was one such stinker (for me). The graphics were pretty nice for its time, but I found the actual gameplay sluggish and clumsy. The sandbox concept worked well, but I spent most of my time walking around those stupid hell dimensions looking for stuff to kill, and then dicking around towns waiting for some NPC to come out of hiding at a specific time of day. Much like GTA, I quickly got bored of the storyline and started playing randomly, killing innocents and all the guards I could handle. I stopped playing it after maybe two weeks... epic fail.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your short term memory must be failing you as well, because you mentioned Crysis not two paragraphs ago.
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Some very nominal special purpose hardware would eat this alive. Remember intel is using unaccelerated general purpose processors to do this!
Exactly, this is what most people seem to forget. While 4 quad-cores (quad quad-core?) might seem like a lot, it is nothing compared to the recent GPUs that have hundreds of cores. If a specialized ray tracing processor could get you even half of the processing power of a single core of these general purpose CPUs (with a fraction of the cost/power usage), imagine what 100-200 of these on a GPU could do... (Keep in mind that ray tracing scales extremely well when you add processing units).
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Only sixteen cores?! For real computing power, you'd could run even more cores-- perhaps (Beowolf?) cluster several million machines so that each is responsible for a single ray/pixel.
Ultimately, this massively parallel distribution will provide data from an even bigger experiment-- what happens when you trace rays from the sun, bounce them off the earth, hit the CO2 layer, bounce back to the earth, back to the atmosphere, back to the earth...
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That would make a cool movie....
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Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
every ps3 owner tells me this same thing. Yet they always are at my house playing my Wii.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
But that's because the Wii graphics are not really poor - they're just adequate for the games people really play.
Of course, if you try to put something like Assasin's Creed or GTA IV on the Wii - the graphics will suck and affect the sense of immersion and gameplay.
But that's also why no one is really playing those kind of games in the Wii.
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What makes the Wii so much fun is that it has a couple dozen absolutely fantastic games that make up for the hundreds of shitty ones. It's like the SNES all over again!
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Because when they're *not* over at your house they're too busy playing singleplayer or internet multiplayer, neither segments are really covered by the Wii. The "friend code" thing (as opposed to, say, a memorable user name) has completely destroyed any chance for the Wii to ever become a popular internet multiplayer machine.
See... on the PS360 you got vast, epic RPGs, crazy single-player shoot-em-ups, and lots of awesome multiplayer action games (COD4, Halo 3, etc etc.), on the Wii you've got party games
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, after countless bad experience, I'm to a point where I'm very worry with good graphics. I almost automatically associate good graphics with poor gameplay and I tend to simply overlook those games.
As an example, a year and a half ago I discovered the Gothic series with Gothic 3. It was a fun game, much better than Oblivion, but I also got bored with the game after a while. I read a lot that the previous title were better, so I bought a copy of Gothic 1 on ebay. Of course, graphics were a lot worse, but the game was also a lot better and it was one of the few games I finished. I also bought Gothic Universe simply to have Gothic 2 NOTR.
Of course, the same game would be better with good graphics than with bad graphics, but graphics are still secondary to gameplay. I'd prefer an "eyesore" with good gameplay than a beauty with an average gameplay.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I believe real-time ray tracing open up some very interesting gameplay possibilities if people know how to use it.
Imagine a FPS, for example, on which you could notice a sneaking bastard on an unusual angle behind you because you saw his reflection on the doorknob you were about to pull. Or maybe cursing at the newbie because he didn't pay attention to the position of a specific lamp and now your team is screwed because your shadows have been noticed.
Then again, I think the whole FPS genre is saturated. Examples of other types of games are welcome here.
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Multiplayer only. Encourages teamwork by having five different classes that need to work together. Each map has multiple objectives. The two sides doesn't have the same weapons, vehicles and, more then often then not, specialities.
If you like FPS multiplayer games but crave more then deathmatch and capture the flag give the demo a try. Avaliable on both linux and windows(and mac but only full game afaik).
A bit of a p
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Even with total strangers they were quite good at forcing people to help each other.
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The addition of objectives gives players some
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Comparatively, I enjoyed UT3 a bit more, largely due to its simplicity: grab orb, make a run for it, capture node / destroy enemy node. No support classes, just Speedball 2 with guns
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest immediately noticeable pros of ray tracing from what I've seen are reflections in arbitrarily complex geometry (current generation raster shadows are only viable for planar and some spherical reflections, unless there's a technique I'm not aware of). This, however isn't a good enough reason to switch to a purely ray traced paradigm IMO.
From a gameplay perspective it all seems a bit niche, but I'm sure there's someone out there with an idea that could make use of it. I just don't see FPS du jour picking it up any time soon.
Having said that, ray tracing may be a good utility to use alongside rastering techniques for things like sub-surface scattering or ambient occlusion.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Dynamic shadows are still optional in just about every game that features them. Why? Because only really fast, expensive cards can do it, and even that's stretching it. Some engines will only render dynamic shadows from one light, and the ones that do it for more than one have to be very careful about not placing too many light sources too close together. This will get better as games finally drop support for DirectX 8 fallback (DX8 is generally not able to do dynamic lights at all), but the other restrictions will likely remain for quite some time.
There's a lot of shortcuts, hacks, and arbitrary map design rules to make this type of thing work. Even things that we're pretty good at these days like water are often more restricted than they seem. You know that nice water in Valve's Source engine? You can't have more than one body of that high-quality water on the screen at the same time, or you're liable to get "unexpected behavior." In other words, it doesn't work. This is specifically mentioned in some of the map making tutorials. So you'll find nowhere in a decently designed map where you can have two different pools with that nice high-quality, reflective, refractive water. You can use the "cheaper" water, though. The cheaper stuff still looks OK, but it's not the real deal and looks strange to see the two side by side. This is mostly an issue where the level of the water is different between two pools of water, such as having a diving pool next to a raised water tank or something. If they're the same height, you can just cheat and use one one body of water clipped through the intervening area for both both bodies of water. This only works, of course, in places where the area in between is unimportant - water floating in mid-air just might be an unexplainable phenomenon in the context of some story lines.
The way I read this, raytracing makes solutions for these types of problems more universal (ie. you just have water, no BS about what kind of water it is and where it can be), and the performance hit for doing it several times in a scene is way less. I'm in no way involved with graphics engines, but I would assume that most of these features require rendering the scene multiple times with different deformations, and that raytracing is somehow faster at this.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Now, those doorknobs will make
A hybrid is the best approach. You correctly guessed that with rasterization, secondary-ray effects need to be calculated in multiple (and costly) passes. Moreover, since these passes usually render to a texture, you get aliasing issues because the texture pixels do not 1:1 match the screen pixels. You get blocky shadowmaps, blocky reflections, or noticeable noise when moving (in case the map is too large).
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Or maybe cursing at the newbie because he didn't pay attention to the position of a specific lamp and now your team is screwed because your shadows have been noticed.
Not really exciting, MetalGear2 had that, SplinterCell had something like that and plenty of other games had similar stuff (Doom3, etc.). You don't need raytracing for that and in terms of gameplay it doesn't really add much, since most games simply are not slow enough that you care about little details like shadows.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
1. It runs on 4 x quad core. Which is about just 4X the CPU power a normal user could have right now. A 4X speed improvement isn't probably that far away. They may be hoping to reach a point where a dedicated video card is no longer needed. With the required performance level being so near, adding some extra support to the CPU may be enough.
2. Raytracing scales differently than methods currently used in games. With raytracing, increasing resolution is what adds the processing time, while adding detail is very cheap. Which I'm guessing means that as soon as you get raytracing going in real time at a decent resolution, adding extra quality is cheap. This would radically change the current situation, and possibly drastically bump the quality level.
3. Raytracing implements effects like shadows and transparency in a straightforward manner, which should make it easier to code. Game developers should like that. Also, in my understanding, raytracing also doesn't need to decompose things like spheres into lots of triangles, so the engine can test a ray's collision with a sphere directly. If you can specify parts of a scene as objects like spheres, toruses and such, it'd result in much finer detail.
What I think Intel is trying to do here to ATI/AMD and nVidia is the same thing fast CPUs did to soundcards. There's no longer a real need to have specialized hardware to play MIDI or add effects to sounds, since the CPU is quite capable of doing it itself. In fact, IIRC, Creative had to *blackmail* John Carmack into supporting EAX, because he could implement the same effects faster using the CPU.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
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1. It runs on 4 x quad core. Which is about just 4X the CPU power a normal user could have right now. A 4X speed improvement isn't probably that far away. They may be hoping to reach a point where a dedicated video card is no longer needed. With the required performance level being so near, adding some extra support to the CPU may be enough.
If everyone had a quad-core, which I doubt is "normal" now though I'll admit it's a standard desktop chip. And I usually play at 1920x1200, that's another 2.5x, plus 14-29 sounds too law to play comfortably, I'd add at least 2x there. So 4x*2.5x*2x = 20x away. Furthermore, while we're moving to faster processors it doesn't look like performance per watt improves that fast. According to Anandtech we can expect a 20-30% overall advantage over Penryn with a 10% increase in power usage, in other words maybe 15
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the CD killed the Algorithm years ago (Score:2)
why bother putting thought and work into actual gameplay and mechanics when we can just make the game prettier?
sadly all too many gamers are locked into the "better graphics = better game" thinking as well which doesn't help the problem.
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The graphics are definitely not first class, but on the other hand I think they're beautiful, because I made it to please me. And at least a few other people like it, too, which is nice.
I'd still be glad to have an artist on board, though :-)
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No Caps? (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh (Score:5, Funny)
Congratulations Intel! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Congratulations Intel! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Congratulations Intel! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if anyone tried to do hardware acceleration with, say, splines or something other than triangles.
Re:Meh (Score:5, Interesting)
The neat thing is that the resulting objects (if properly defined) have "infinite" detail. The roughness on a surface, for instance, can be based on a noise function, so you can zoom into it without ever seeing triangulation or other artifacts.
The obvious downside is that the computation here is intensive. Objects can be arbitrarily complicated. Calculating the intersection of a ray with a mathematically-defined surface involves very complex calculations. Rendering POV-ray scenes on modern hardware, for instance, can take minutes to days (depending on complexity).
One upside is that the rendering can be tuned to available resources. On older hardware, the number of light-sources (or the intersection accuracy, etc.) can be reduced. This would mean that video game graphics would get arbitrarily "better and better" on newer hardware, without any need for someone to change the code. Having said all this... I think our hardware is not yet powerful enough to make this kind of thing practical. (There are some neat examples that have been coded, but as a general technique we're not there yet.)
pov-ray style rendering (Score:2)
I like POV-Ray for many of the same reasons; the syntax is very friendly and the available primitives give a lot of flexibility. Most of the fastest real-time ray tracers just support triangles, though, because it makes them simpler and you don't have the overhead of deciding which ray-intersection function to use with each primitive.
I think a typical game developer isn't likely to care if they can make exact spheres and cones and such; the majority of real-life objects aren't perfect quadrics, and are m
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All of the earliest 3D renderers (the stuff Lucas Arts developed for Star Wars, whatever they used for the Light Cycles in Tron) used combinations of geometrical primitives as models. They moved to tessellation because most of the things you want to model in movies and video games do not lend themselves to procedural definition very well.
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I've always wanted a realtime graphics engine based on something like the POV-ray ray-tracer
CSG can work with a rasterizer, see for example Ensemblist [nongnu.org]. The problem with CSG however is that it just isn't very practical for game modeling, its nice for industrial work where you want to have exactness, but not for games where you want it pretty and want it fast. And of course CSG is rather useless when you want to model something organic like a human or a monster.
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This would mean that video game graphics would get arbitrarily "better and better" on newer hardware, without any need for someone to change the code.
A few games have already applied this idea. Quake 3(and i assume 4 as well as the quake3 derivatives) use Curved surfaces [gamasutra.com], Messiah [wikipedia.org] i believe used models that had millions of polygons, and the game engine automatically applied LOD when rendering them to keep a good FPS.
Morrowind supports Continuous Tessellation and N-Patch [lanior.ru] rendering if you have an ATI card, and turn it on using tweaking tools.
With newer and bigger storage there really is no reason NOT to ship with full resolution images and model defini
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That's because the demo wasn't about finer geometry or higher-res textures or better bumpmaps. It was about the reflection and refraction bonuses you get with ray-tracing that you don't with rasterization, which won't really affect anything you were talking about.
Why do i feel that ... (Score:2, Informative)
Seeing these comments reflects very well the average human intellect about a subject before talking about it.
Then what's so special in ray tracing versus rasterization?
It's actual real world based mimickery. Ray tracing mimicks how real world works.
Ask yourself would you prefer physics to correlate to real world physics, or something quickly around the corner which is something like that bu
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Re:Why do i feel that ... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're waiting for humans to get rid of fast approximations when they're good enough, I hope you're patient.
Re:Why do i feel that ... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Why do i feel that ... (Score:5, Informative)
Raytracing doesn't mimic how real world works. In fact it does exactly the opposite of what happens in real world. In real world you have bazillions of light particles, doubling also as waves, shoot out of many area light sources and bounce/be absorbed by objects around them.
Whatever photons end up hitting your retina, is what you see.
Raytracing instead shoots a ray out of your (virtual) retina straight forward to the scene and may refract/reflect off objects, until it's "absorbed" (means, hits a surface where refraction/reflection isn't calculated).
Rendering a single frame of 3D as it is in the "real world" (with just a fraction of the rays) would mean days on even the fastest hardware out there.
What raytracing gives you is sharp reflections, refractions and shadows, while introducing a bunch of other limitations on the rendering that rasterization doesn't have. It also can't do soft shadows, reflections, refractions, efficiently, nor subsurface scattering, or radiosity.
Best models for rendering in the future will likely be hybrid models similar to what is now used in professional renderers by movie studios. But then again, it's a game, who cares about mathematicaly accurate reflections, when you can fake it close enough with reflection/refraction maps in a fraction of the processing time.
Re:Why do i feel that ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume you didn't mean for "efficiently" to be an item in your list, which is the way you wrote it, but raytracers can do all of those things. (I'll make no claims about efficiency.)
"But then again, it's a game, who cares about mathematicaly accurate reflections, when you can fake it close enough with reflection/refraction maps in a fraction of the processing time."
That argument is no more valid that if you say "it's just a game, why don't you just do raycasting, which takes a fraction of the processing time". "Faking it close enough" isn't close enough; it's obvious that you're faking it, and it requires that you either live with it or design your game to minimize the impact of faking it.
While I agree with you, (Score:2)
one - you're about to be deluged by haters. I've said these very things here and the haters are quite enthusiastic. They're also wrong.
two - the other guys aren't standing still either. No doubt the other guys are looking into ray tracing now that the level of tech to support it is coming around.
Raytracing, for the win.
Why do I feel... (Score:2)
Honestly it isn't like either ray-tracing or raster graphics will cure hunger or disease, so to me "close enough" is good enough. It's just entertainment after all.
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I'm a gamer, and I would love ray-traced games. Half-Life 2 looked good in its day, as did Half-Life several years before it, but we're getting to the point where if we want things to look more realistic (and believe me, gamers do), we're going to need to switch to ray tracing.
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Noone would want ray-trace-quality graphics in their games?
Realtime raytracing as demonstrated here is good for shiny spheres and little else. I don't know about you, but I have rather little use for shiny spheres in my games and if I do a little fake environment map does the job quite well.
How realistic a rendering looks simply has nothing to do if you rasterize or raytrace, its just a different approach to get pixels on the screen. Global illumination and all that stuff is what matters when you want a really realistic look, but you don't get that for free with e
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Ray Tracing and Pixel Shaders (Score:4, Interesting)
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After close examination of the screenshots (Score:2, Interesting)
There is no lighting, normal mapping, or material fidelity here. So this is a long way from being the quality of a final product, but it is a good demo and a start in the right direction.
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That reminds me of the original Half Life 2 trailer (before the first game) that appeared to promise such things as realtime material reflections and refractions.
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where's the video (Score:3, Insightful)
Reflective spheres (Score:5, Funny)
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blur of the line (Score:2, Interesting)
By the way, please don't publish pictures on t.v. sets. It hurts the eyes.
Ultimately, ray tracing is going to win but not at 13 frames a second.
Minimum framerate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Minimum usable framerate is around 35fps, if a fps drops under this, don't bother. Particularly don't bother if its going to cost 10 times the price for one tenth the framerate
Still need dedicated hardware. (Score:5, Informative)
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http://www.linkedin.com/in/slusallek [linkedin.com]
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Sure, making anything in small quantity costs a lot more per unit.
But now what would it cost, per unit, if ATI or nVidia was making RPUs the way they make GPUs? Then it's largely a matter of process and gate count, and the RPU had a fraction of the gates in a modern GPU.
Take that, John Carmack! (Score:5, Funny)