I don't think this will catch on in consumer realm for a long time. Normal raster based GPU's will be much faster, and much cheaper. So until they can make this run most games as fast as a GPU, and at most within a 10% higher price, then at most Pixar n co will buy these to get a vague look at their work in real-time. Sure ray-tracing look's pretty, but that video was some water, which Dx10 made water look kinda nice. Show me (oh this is so cliched) Crysis running Ray-traced at a decent speed. Cos even a normal GPU can do 2 car's n a pond.
Read the article. These cards reside alongside the GPU and process the ray tracing required by the scene for lighting, etc. The GPU will still be used to do post processing and other things. It's an add-on card like PhysX was, not a GPU replacement.
That was 3-hfps, with a GPU backing it up. Ouch. I can knock out HD-quality render's of simple object's at about 12fps, and that's CPU based. So currently this tech isn't selling me. The dream of Ray-Traced real-time render's is a nice one, but beyond tying it to a Quadro for 3D film work I personally don't see any future in this. especially in gaming. Give it a decade or so n GPU may hit a wall like the CPU did in the ghz race, but until then GPU's are cheaper, faster and good enough.
Exactly. We got so good at cheaply faking the appearance of ray tracing that this tech has become moot. 'But we got true accurate caustics working at 2-3FPS at VGA resolutions, and all it took was this $500 card!'. Who cares! Of the 10% of people that might actually spot the difference accurate ray tracing would make to a games, only 10% of that set will actually care, and only 10% of that subset would be willing to spend the extra money. To be honest, I don't really see the point for the likes of Pixar either. Sure they want accurate ray calcs for the big screen, but they also want the kind of programmable flexibility that hardware renderers never provide. Larabee might help but I bet this won't.
Well, anyway, I certainly don't wish fail on these guys, but I don't expect them to set the world on fire either. Ray tracing might become a standard (as the GPU people need to have Something to sell as 'the next big thing'), but it won't have really been necessary.
The demo was fully utilizing the card. The final product would be an estimated 14x more powerful. At first it could be used to assist raster rendering by accelerating their already ray traced lighting tricks.
Please read the article instead of speculating and spreading fud.
So, 14x faster = 60fps at VGA resolutions. Whoop-dee-doo.
Why, given that ray tracing gives you pretty much all "realistic" effects for free, are they demoing a dull grey landscape with a couple of cars? It's not exactly a mind blowing demo, especially given what people like intel were demoing a couple of years back on distinctly less specialised hardware.
This wasn't using the GPU at all. This ISNT a hardware renderer. This lets you use the full power of your raytracing shading pipeline. But accelerates it. It's a hardware co-processor for a SOFTWARE renderer.
A GPU is a hardware renderer. It's extremely limiting and extremely frustrating to work with. The Caustic card ISN'T A RENDERER. It's a render accellerator. It would be like calling PhysX a game engine. It's not a game engine, it's a co-processor.
Now if your game wants to use raytracing it can call data like it would the CPU. This is exactly the same as using a CPU only faster. This is also very clearly still 'developer art'. The simplicity of the shaders is a result of the demonstration not the capability of the card. Anything that uses Raytracing can use raytracing EXACTLY the same as it does currently just faster.
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I don't think this will catch on in consumer realm for a long time.
Normal raster based GPU's will be much faster, and much cheaper. So until they can make this run most games as fast as a GPU, and at most within a 10% higher price, then at most Pixar n co will buy these to get a vague look at their work in real-time.
Sure ray-tracing look's pretty, but that video was some water, which Dx10 made water look kinda nice. Show me (oh this is so cliched) Crysis running Ray-traced at a decent speed. Cos even a normal GPU can do 2 car's n a pond.
Read the article. These cards reside alongside the GPU and process the ray tracing required by the scene for lighting, etc. The GPU will still be used to do post processing and other things. It's an add-on card like PhysX was, not a GPU replacement.
That was 3-hfps, with a GPU backing it up. Ouch.
I can knock out HD-quality render's of simple object's at about 12fps, and that's CPU based. So currently this tech isn't selling me. The dream of Ray-Traced real-time render's is a nice one, but beyond tying it to a Quadro for 3D film work I personally don't see any future in this. especially in gaming. Give it a decade or so n GPU may hit a wall like the CPU did in the ghz race, but until then GPU's are cheaper, faster and good enough.
Exactly. We got so good at cheaply faking the appearance of ray tracing that this tech has become moot. 'But we got true accurate caustics working at 2-3FPS at VGA resolutions, and all it took was this $500 card!'. Who cares! Of the 10% of people that might actually spot the difference accurate ray tracing would make to a games, only 10% of that set will actually care, and only 10% of that subset would be willing to spend the extra money. To be honest, I don't really see the point for the likes of Pixar either. Sure they want accurate ray calcs for the big screen, but they also want the kind of programmable flexibility that hardware renderers never provide. Larabee might help but I bet this won't.
Well, anyway, I certainly don't wish fail on these guys, but I don't expect them to set the world on fire either. Ray tracing might become a standard (as the GPU people need to have Something to sell as 'the next big thing'), but it won't have really been necessary.
The demo was fully utilizing the card. The final product would be an estimated 14x more powerful. At first it could be used to assist raster rendering by accelerating their already ray traced lighting tricks.
Please read the article instead of speculating and spreading fud.
Also, this is a prototype card. It's running at 100Mhz instead of the 350Mhz they would like and it's using FPGA Processors instead of final hardware.
So, 14x faster = 60fps at VGA resolutions. Whoop-dee-doo.
Why, given that ray tracing gives you pretty much all "realistic" effects for free, are they demoing a dull grey landscape with a couple of cars? It's not exactly a mind blowing demo, especially given what people like intel were demoing a couple of years back on distinctly less specialised hardware.
Elmer you completely miss the point.
This wasn't using the GPU at all. This ISNT a hardware renderer. This lets you use the full power of your raytracing shading pipeline. But accelerates it. It's a hardware co-processor for a SOFTWARE renderer.
A GPU is a hardware renderer. It's extremely limiting and extremely frustrating to work with. The Caustic card ISN'T A RENDERER. It's a render accellerator. It would be like calling PhysX a game engine. It's not a game engine, it's a co-processor.
Now if your game wants to use raytracing it can call data like it would the CPU. This is exactly the same as using a CPU only faster. This is also very clearly still 'developer art'. The simplicity of the shaders is a result of the demonstration not the capability of the card. Anything that uses Raytracing can use raytracing EXACTLY the same as it does currently just faster.