Intel may be heading down the wrong path.

[Scott]

Intel is going to be making a big push for Ray Tracing as the new way to do graphics when they introduce their new highend GPU in 2009/2010.

But John Carmak thinks it is not the way to go. Read about it here (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532)!!

[tyle6]

links broke :frown:

[Scott]

Link fixed.

[Nocutius]

All this is way over my head, but for coding graphics i simply have to trust Carmack over Intel.

[zachig]

Hehehe...:lol: I also trust John Carmack but I'm optimistic about Intel as well...;-)

I guess only time will tell if Intel is going in the wrong (or maybe correct) way...:roll:

[Frag Maniac]

Though John is brilliant, he has a way of sort of helping you to understand what he's saying. John's concept of what should be proritized falls right in line with the way I adjust a game's settings too. I want lots of detail in the environment and don't care if the shadows aren't perfect, they're resource hogs anyway. What he says about proof of concept are words a lot of the big wigs should be living by too.

That being said, I can't believe such words about SLI were coming from John's mouth. He makes it sound as if you get a solid 100% boost in every dual card setup, which we all know is far from the truth. Then again he seemed to be speaking in terms of resolution rather than frame rates, which is not the way most look at SLI boost. I could see how you might be able to go to a res with twice the number of pixels, such as 1024x640 to 1440x900, but without factoring in settings and frame rates it's rather moot.

You have to wonder after what he said about Intel being so confident without proof of concept in their plan to use traditional ray tracing means they in fact think they can successfully produce a working 3Ghz GPU. After all, look at how holistically and step by step they plan their CPU evolution. For the most part they have proven their CPUs can do what they've designed them to be able to do, though it's certainly not without preliminary testing before production starts. Maybe they're just being tongue in cheek about a possible demo that would prove their concept worthy.

What worries me most about this article is that John confirms what many of us have been worried about. The developers aren't seeing much point in making engines for the PC anymore but rather for consoles then giving us watered down ports. When such a key figure in PC gaming makes a statement like that you have to wonder if IW, Valve and others are thinking the same.

[nes]

I think this is a good idea. Ray Tracing would be cool if they can get it to run at real time. Plus, it would put big time companies (ahem ATI & NVIDIA) Graphics Solutions Companies in the hot seat because all of them there shaders would become obsolete!

I say good show Intel! They should have stepped in with this tech earlier in the game. I get all excited when I think about intel GPUs.

[Nocutius]

Carmack apparently is not the only one, Cevat Yerli from Crytek (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=546)has some doubts as well.

[Scott]

Excerpts of interview with Cevat Yerli (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=546)
“So far I haven’t seen a compelling example for using pure classical ray tracing.
Reflections from arbitrarily shaped objects and point light source shadows are two situations which show off the capabilities of ray tracing well. I don’t see the development community switching to ray tracing just to get pixel perfect reflections from arbitrary surfaces, as most real world materials aren’t perfectly reflective and a distorted planar reflection often looks just as good. Using ray casting for shadows in a hybrid renderer might be a possible solution for the future, but I can see substantial possible gains from developments with current technologies for this.”
“Both methods have been in the race for some time, but rasterization is significantly ahead based on real world efficiencies. I think rasterization has a solid history of optimizations both in software and hardware that support its future viability.”

Excerpt of interview with John Carmack (http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532)
“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. There are large advantages to rasterization from a performance standpoint and many of the things that they argue as far as using efficient culling technologies to be able to avoid referencing a lot of geometry, those are really bogus arguments because you could do similar things with occlusion queries and conditional renders with rasterization. Head to head rasterization is just a vastly more efficient use of whatever transistors you have available.”


Editorial comments from Ryan Shrout:
“Intel's push for ray tracing is more than likely a result of their upcoming Larrabee architecture and its inherent weakness with current GPU programming models; because it is essentially a many-core x86 compatible device it will be forced to emulate DirectX and OpenGL and probably won't have the power to compete with the dedicated GPU products from NVIDIA and AMD out of the gate. Emulation always produces a performance overhead that will cut back on the utilization of the full power of Intel's Larrabee and obviously they'd rather that NOT be the case.
“Cevat does see a future for ray tracing, but more in the form of a mixed rendering design that probably won't be implemented for several years; five or more. By his count, for the next three years or so rasterization will continue to be the dominate rendering method for games and thus any potential graphics hardware for this market will need to compatible and perform well on rasterization. Cevat thinks that in a time span of three to five years we might begin to see some implementation of ray tracing in games but not in the pure, classical ray tracing fashion. Instead we will likely see the hybrid rendering techniques that we have discussed several times in previous interviews: ray tracing for shadows, certain reflective objects, etc.”

[Miker]

Ray tracing is the future. Do any of you know what it is? If you really understood what it was you would think it is a good idea.

[PP Mguire]

I havent read up on any of this or that thing that was supposed to happen. What was it? Display Port right? I probably should though.

[Kougar]

Ray tracing is the future. Do any of you know what it is? If you really understood what it was you would think it is a good idea.

That's a specious arguement. I've read every single article out there on Intel's Ray Tracing, and from what I understand and many concede Ray Tracing may indeed be the future... but not any time soon.

Intel's Larabee is reportedly going to support hardware rasterization, and there is a very big reason for this. If they want a prayer of enticing PC game developers to design games to their hardware they will have to support it, almost no one is going to design a full PC game specifically for only ray tracing on Larabee unless they see a profit in doing so.

Considering the PC game market is shrinking and not many home users have a use for Larabee it makes no sense for them to design a game that has so few possible potential sales that they would never even recoup production costs, hence the lack of profit and lack of motivation from game developers.

Larabee may take off, but it won't for desktop gaming. I have to agree with Carmack when he said he believes a hybrid approach would likely be the future, but to get there Larabee will have to offer normal rasterizing like any other GPU card and perform well enough and a good enough price to sell chips to grab a good portion of the graphics market.

Assuming they can grab a large enough portion of the market, game developers just may focus on ray tracing parts or all of their games if they see some sort of good reason to do so.

The situation simply mirrors the problem with AGEIA, they won't get the game developer support without the large user base and they won't get a large user base unless Joes like you and me see a reason to buy Larabee instead of (Or in addition to) the latest greatest GPU. Intel is going up hill on this one. :)

Of course Larabee is more than just a ray tracer, so it's not a perfect parallel to the physX card. Intel will likely be selling many of these for General Purpose and HPC computing, Larabee will certainly be loads better than GPGPU has been to date due to the lack of coding hurdles that currently hamstring the GPGPU potential.

[Methious]

Finally a little insight into the subject. I finally got tired of reading semi uninformed views and quit, then low and behold good info from people I trust.

Thanks!

[Frag Maniac]

Ray tracing is the future. Do any of you know what it is? If you really understood what it was you would think it is a good idea.As John stated it's only going to be feasible if Intel can come up with some proof of concept via a demo that it will work, which he figures will take a 3Ghz GPU to pull of at adequate frame rates. I wouldn't doubt that Intel could eventually make something like a 45nm or even 32nm 3Ghz GPU, perhaps even a multi core one. The problem is though, it would involve a mass amount of remanufacturing going from shader compatible hardware to ray tracing hardware.

Aside from that it would likely be even harder than it is now for gamers on a budget to afford frame rate efficient gear, which is becoming ever more a factor with games like Crysis, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry 2, etc. What I propose is Intel try to make such a GPU, maybe starting out single core then trying multi core, use if for current rasterization rendering, then maybe see later if they can work hybrid ray tracing/rasterization rendering into the mix. It's a big enough concept to require several years worth of gradual implementation, not only on the software side but the hardware side.

Besides being a way of testing their idea without drastically disrupting current manufacturing methods, the above proposal could very well give Intel a chance to see if multi core GPUs could eventually replace multi card SLI and Crossfire setups. With the way they've been making affordable multi core CPUs, it could eventually be a cheaper way to go than buying mulitple cards, and probably perform better too.

[Miker]

Ray tracing if done right will be great, but right now do you really want a $3000 "GPU"?

[Andrew1990]

Honestly, why dont companies just stick to how they are currently making cards? Graphics now a days are looking pretty good. I am all for Intel making video cards, but I do not want a video card company to split off from the rest and use a totally different technology that no games use.

[Miker]

Honestly, why dont companies just stick to how they are currently making cards? Graphics now a days are looking pretty good. I am all for Intel making video cards, but I do not want a video card company to split off from the rest and use a totally different technology that no games use.

It is just progress. What if you said to stay with single core CPUs? Or DX6?

[Andrew1990]

It is just progress. What if you said to stay with single core CPUs? Or DX6?


Well as long as the made progress with the single core CPUs I would be happy. Just look at the FX57, it still is a very powerful single core processor able to play any game available.