Real-time Raytracing For PC Games Almost A Reality

Vigile writes "Real-time raytracing has often been called the pinnacle of computer rendering for games but only recently has it been getting traction in the field. A German student, and now Intel employee, has been working on raytraced versions of the Quake 3 and Quake 4 game engines for years and is now using the power of Intel's development teams to push the technology further. With antialiasing implemented and anisotropic filtering close behind, they speculate that within two years the hardware will exist on the desktop to make 'game quality' raytracing graphics a reality."

Give me gameplay.

[xC0000005]

I grew up with video games where the blob of pixels barely resembles anything. The power of gameplay, lasting gameplay far outstrips graphics. Not that a little eye candy doesn't hurt. I guess the core problem is that nothing Intel produces can run time optimize "Lair" into "Tetris" or otherwise correct for this.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[Lije Baley]

It's like what I used to say about pushing higher resolutions for television: Ten minutes into a GOOD show or movie and people are no longer conscious of the fact that they are watching it on a 12-inch black and white set.

Raytracing is "embarassingly" parallel

[recoiledsnake]

Raytracing comes under a class of problems that are embarassingly parallel. Want to render 2 million(~1920x1020) pixels? Send them to 2 million processors(cores) simultaneously and get results back. This is possible because there is rendering each pixel is independent of rendering another. Note that all the data required(like textures, lights, etc.) should be available to all the processors, so SETI style high latency computation is out of the question.

What makes it interesting is that the gigahertz race is done with and has turned into a "core" race. Intel was already showcasing 80 cores on the same chip. A few cores dedicated to Phong shading algorithms and radiosity and the rest to ray tracing would simply overshadow the current raster rendering. Also, raytracing is mathematically elegant and simple compared to all the dirty tricks employed by current graphics technology so it should make programmers' lives easier(unlike the Cell processor which is a nightmare to code for).

Gameplay vs Graphics

[king-manic]

Most people who pine for better game play are not looking hard enough. Generally they suffer form a severe case of nostalgia. Back int he bad old days for each Super Mario brothers or Missile command there were 4 ET's, Coeleco smurfs or Custer's Revenge. You just don't remember them. The past wasn't some golden age where game play trumps graphics. IT was a place where event he brilliant games had significant control issues, where top shelf games wouldn't been be considered tier 3 dreck today. Take a much maligned games liek Lair, is the basic controls any worse then say NARC for the NES? but NARC was a "good" game for it's time while Lair is a maligned as crap. I haven't played lair but bad controls are no longer acceptable.

There is game play innovation today, and it doesn't have to be independent of pretty graphics. In fact the people responsible for the game play aren't the ones responsible for innovative game play. One does not diminish the other. Good game play is also not the same as innovative game play. They coincide for instance in games like Katamari damacy but often innovation ~= unpolished ~= crap. What we're all looking for is polished game play. It never changes that around 80% of everything will be considered crap. So just rmeember that back int he day 80% of everything was crap too but you just don't remember. So they can ray trace graphics, thats awesome. Will it diminish gameplay.. not really you'll still have 80/20 rule. It's not an indication that things were better then before only that your brain works in a funny way.

Re:If nothing else, multiplatform

[hattig]

Most likely the ray traced games of tomorrow will be running on ray tracing accelerators, namely graphics cards. Probably the same graphics cards as the next generation or two, running the ray tracing via shaders...

Sure, Intel like to talk about their 80 core x86 chip, but when it comes down to it I'm fairly certain that to get anything better than 'barely acceptable' you'll have a beast of an accelerator from nVidia or AMD. However it may make it easier for Intel to elbow into the game.

Note that you could buy ray tracing accelerators 10 years ago. There was a Cambridge based company that put them in a form factor like a DIMM.

Re:Give me gameplay.

[king-manic]

The power of gameplay, lasting gameplay far outstrips graphics

arcade Pac-man was awesome game play for it's time. I doubt I could stand more then 10 min of it. Super mario brothers was awesome for it's time. I doubt I could ever finish it again without being bored silly. Final Fantasy 6 was awesome for its time. I could play it still all the way through once a year. But my younger brother gets bored to tears. Gameplay dates itself too. We suffer from nostalgia, you and me. Gameplay is fun. Eye candy is fun. A good story is fun. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[JesseL]

The ART and PLAY teams are still both being paid from the same source of funding, correct?
I think the grand-parent's point still stands.

Better graphics != worse gameplay

[Nazmun]

I don't see why most slashdotter's think that if a company does decent graphics they cannot have good gameplay. Sure there is a lot of crap games that come out but this was true in the past too. Graphics have been going up but I can't say that gameplay has necessarily been going down completely. There were plenty of genesis/nintendo games I simply didn't find to be fun. In any case improved graphics in the last ten years has allowed for more diverse, immersing, and heart wrenching games.

PS2+ games are the same but with a slight increase in learning curve (most older games you can just pickup immediately and it was a matter of skill and timing mastery to complete, newer systems usually employ more complicated but still fun gameplay). It has great games and crappy games, just all the graphics are 3d and generally better looking. Some dev's just don't understand how to make an enjoyable game.

Also better graphics allows for different games and more complex games. Imagine if you were limited to the graphics of let's say early tetris/pac-man (i wonder why we only remember a handful of games from the era =P hint hint*) or even more primitive like the first version of pong. It's safe to say if we were limited to the most basic levels of gaming for the last 30 years the market wouldn't be as large, appealing, or diverse as it is now.

Racing simulator's, cinematic rpgs, cinematic fps's (or any fps for that matter), simply wouldn't be possible. With pong lvl graphics yo'd be limited to one dot as a target and maybe different colored squares to target. Simply not anywhere near as immersive. Imagine when Resident Evil started the survival horror genre. I remember playing it at night on my PC (RE: 2) and just being completely freaking spooked during certain parts. I don't think ultra basic midi music and little blurbs of pixels could ever accomplish that.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[slew]

True, raytracing by itself will not make gameplay any better, nor animation better. However, it should make some visual effects that are hard today (shadows, reflections) simple. Hopefully, this will free up developers to work on other things instead of 'getting the shadows right'.

I'll have to disagree with that. For many people "right" looking shadows are like the movies and television shows. Shadows and light/dark interplay in these environments are far from natural and even in ray-traced environments, animators laboriously juggle "fake" light sources to make the shadows "right" looking.

Also "single" bounce reflections are essentially "solved" problems with triangle rendering (environment maps), so only real advantages of ray tracing are "multi-bounce" and "self-shadowing" which are somewhat easier to solve in a ray-traced environment instead of a triangle rendered environment. Although sometimes these are interesting effects, they generally fall in the "eye-candy" side of the fence today and developers rarely spend much time on these (or so we hope given the state of game-play and AI in todays games), and they generally just implement canned solutions (e.g., some self-shadowing bump-map pixel shader technique) for certain "effects".

Re:Big improvement on the way

[Artraze]

Last I checked, that's the whole point of rendering engines, like Quake 3 and so many others. While they may end up needing modifications for maximum performance, I would be amazed if this didn't as well. Oh sure, maybe in 10 years when we have full hardware ray tracing and hypertransport based physics processors that will alleviate the need to spend so much time performance tuning. Until then though, this is not going to be any better than any other engine. From a developer's perspective at least. It may make for some prettier graphics though.

Sigh

[derEikopf]

"Hey look, the photons accurately react with the environment according to current laws of physics! Finally they figured out how to make games fun!"

:-\

The obsession with graphics is ruining the gaming industry. Compare the PS3's sales to the Wii's [msn.com] for evidence.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[badboy_tw2002]

I don't think it really does. Successful teams often start with a small core group that focuses on gameplay, and develops simple prototype models for the gameplay before any of the art direction is even decided, or any production art is even being developed. Generally the gameplay and game concepts is locked down before the real production even starts. This is in an idealized world - you also have to deal with market deadlines and such, and the more time the preproduction is cut, the less time you have to perfect the gameplay specifics.

The other thing is you can't throw money at gameplay. You simply can't throw 10 more people on "gameplay" and have them come up with that killer feature that makes it all that much more fun to play the game. That usually comes from a single designer, and if that guy isn't there, then the idea won't make it to the game. Where the money comes in is putting people on engineering to make the gameplay designs a reality. Those things can get cut based on time and money, but generally the basic rule of thumb is "art is cheap, engineering is not". I can start making art for a game today without knowing how the gameplay will work. The models can be post-processed down to whatever they need to run on, or I can go back in a second pass to apply the necessary elements the game engine requires, but the process of _creating_ the art is one that is "solved".

I actually think the primary reason a game will come off as "unfun" and why the call of what seems to be the 80's 90's generation version of "back in my day" in regards to "games used to be more fun" is that the industry has gone away from having a "director". Some games have them, and not all successful games need them, but there was a time when you could name the designer of a game, often because his name was on the box: Sid Meir's Civilization, Wil Wright's Sim City, etc. This was back when often the game designer was also the game programmer, maybe even the game artist and sound designer. Now a lot of time (like big budget movies) games are done by committee, with multiple people putting their hands in the pot and you get a muddled, water downed version of the original designer's vision. I'm actually very positive about the future of gaming because of the availability of tools and publishing outlets that will let a small, indie shop put something "commercial" together. The Virtual Console, Steam, XNA, XBLA, Sony Home, etc. all are new tools that are in some ways helping to put the ability to produce a commercial quality game back in the hands of the indie developer, and give them a method to actually get a game shipped. Many would disagree, but I think the quality of film and television has increased and will increase with the ability to make stuff for cheaper (digital editing, filming) and get it out to the public (cable, mulitplexes, Youtube). Sure there's a lot of crap, and there will always be crap, because crap is easy and crap can make money. But there are also gems that exist now that didnt' have a chance previously. So to bring it home, stuff like having realistic looking worlds for very little work brings the bar lower for entry into the commercial market. This will only increase the viability of smaller projects that can compete with the big boys and will bring back some of the variety that the industry has lost along the way. To say something that will make good looking games easier to make will detract from gameplay is I think a bit misguided and a little short sighted.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[lawpoop]

I see what you're saying now -- technology ( in this case, neither rendering nor ray-tracing ) does not give us "art for free" -- you still need animators, voice actors, lighting, set-makers, etc. etc. It just gives us another venue to perform art, which still takes the same amount of time.

Visuals are a lost cause.

[wild_berry]

I have never understood the race to photorealism in games. Perhaps it's for those back-of-box screenshots ("from a version you'll never own"). Better graphics are nice, but they swap the the player's imagination for visual detail. Games companies do this, diverting programming resources from what a game plays like to what a game looks like, without realising that there's a "+5, imagination" gameplay boost that comes from believing that the collection of bad sprites on screen is humanity's last chance for survival against some alien creatures. I think that the greatest advance in the last decade for immersion is the use of surround speakers, not better graphics.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[MenTaLguY]

The one problem is that models made of spheres, boxes, cylinders and ellipsoids simply don't look very good. You need some kind of spline surface or polygon mesh instead to get decent artistic results. At least the spline surface could be cheaper to render than the equivalent tesselation, though.

Re:Big improvement on the way

[timeOday]

Could you go further into why raytracing is better for deformable terrain (including buildings etc)? I think static environments are one of the most glaring problems of simulated environments.