Quake Wars raytraced

[Richard]

Saw this on Blues. There's a video and screenshots just released from GDC earlier this year.

The later part of the video is more interesting where QW raytraced is shown and some specifics are discussed (including collision detection and animated surface effects using rays).

 

[ShaidarHaran]

While technically interesting, I see little value in having many reflective objects in the average scene in a video game. If this is all RT has to offer, I'll stick with rasterization, thanks.

Also, you may want to use the more direct link to the actual piece (containing the video) on PCGH

 

[Sxotty]

I hope we can actually move forward and eventually end up with a hybrid approach that has some of the benefits of ray trace, and voxels.

 

[TimothyFarrar]

What I enjoyed most about that link above is how absolutely devoid of any useful info. Like they did 90fps @ 720P for primary rays only? Yeah on what kind of system? And what is actual fps on those scenes with secondary rays combined?

 

[ShaidarHaran]

What I enjoyed most about that link above is how absolutely devoid of any useful info. Like they did 90fps @ 720P for primary rays only? Yeah on what kind of system? And what is actual fps on those scenes with secondary rays combined?

It's been mentioned elsewhere I believe that an 8-core system was utilized to achieve the 720P Q4 RT results. Unfortunately I can't find the right combination of keywords to prove this via Google, so I'll have to do a more thorough search and post the results when I find them.

Edit: it was 16 cores

 

[Richard]

While technically interesting, I see little value in having many reflective objects in the average scene in a video game. If this is all RT has to offer, I'll stick with rasterization, thanks.

Also, you may want to use the more direct link to the actual piece (containing the video) on PCGH

Thanks! I meant to put a link but I was in a bit of hurry because of the Euro Cup

 

[jlippo]

For me it seemed that they didn't render all the lights, shaders and textures from the original levels.
I find it pointless to show a scene from a game and boast couple of new effects, if rest of the scene has only base texture.

Shaders are expensive and one of the bad things about reflections/refractions is possible shading blowout.
I would have loved to see the multiple portals/mirros scene with portals having material shaders of 100-300 instructions..

 

[Sxotty]

It's been mentioned elsewhere I believe that an 8-core system was utilized to achieve the 720P Q4 RT results. Unfortunately I can't find the right combination of keywords to prove this via Google, so I'll have to do a more thorough search and post the results when I find them.

Edit: it was 16 cores

The link actually isn't clear whether it is 16 or 8. It could be 8 cores since that is what they used for the demonstration. Still doubling cores is getting cheaper than doubling frequency so...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Probably the most boring and useless video of the year, I really should not have bothered to watch it. Even the dude talking there seems to be bored and completely unexcited.

Seriously, who gives a damn? GTA4's water is just as good for the average viewer.

 

[nAo]

Seriously, who gives a damn? GTA4's water is just as good for the average viewer.

Actually water in GTAIV looks better than the water in that video.

 

[RacingPHT]

IMO they should definitely porting GT5 rather than Quakes.
I see virtually no enhancements, except for reflections(they don't even use fresnel effect)

 

[Davros]

Gt5 ?

 

[Johnny_Physics]

Probably the most boring and useless video of the year, I really should not have bothered to watch it. Even the dude talking there seems to be bored and completely unexcited.

Seriously, who gives a damn? GTA4's water is just as good for the average viewer.

noo!! you just wait until they unleash their 40 core pythons and ray trace-a-mania is gonna run wild on you! When your puny computer is done drawing that fancy image on you it will use unparalleled ray tracing magic to perform a line intersection test for whater it is your gun is pointing at or something else not very impressive!

 

[Scali]

What about character animation? They still use precalced meshes like they did with that Q3A raytracer?
How would you have interactive skinned animations then, like with 'modern' games such as HalfLife 2?

And what about AA/AF? They still only bruteforce that with supersampling, or is there an efficient way so we can actually have something better than just bilinear filtered textures and no mipmapping, like most realtime raytracers?

 

[Simon F]

And what about AA/AF? They still only bruteforce that with supersampling, or is there an efficient way so we can actually have something better than just bilinear filtered textures and no mipmapping, like most realtime raytracers?

"Ray tracing with cones" (Amantides) or "Pencil tracing" should allow MIP map textures. The former isn't too hard to implement.

 

[Scali]

"Ray tracing with cones" (Amantides) or "Pencil tracing" should allow MIP map textures. The former isn't too hard to implement.

Yea, what I want to know is: have they implemented it, and does it actually work well enough?

Thing is, as long as character animations are only precalced and we don't get decent texture filtering, who would want to game with raytracing? It'd be a step back from the image quality and interactivity that we have in games today, which are worth far more than some reflections...

 

[Hekking]

Did I get it right that raytracing likes a lot of integer calculation power?
If devs go hybrid Intel has still a tough job to do to come even nearby in normal graphic performance, something I don't expect to happen within 2 years

 

[Scali]

Hum, did that Daniel Pohl-guy actually claim that the plane flying over the reflecting spider could not be done with rasterizing? Guess he's never heard of dynamic cubemapping?

 

[Simon F]

Did I get it right that raytracing likes a lot of integer calculation power?

If you mean integer maths, then "no"; it's predominantly floating point. If however you meant branching, then "yes"; including traversal of acceleration structures etc.

 

[Sxotty]

Ray tracing does have some neat effects, but in comparison to voxels I think it is a far worse advance. Why doesn't Intel go crazy on voxels? They use tons of CPU power so if that is their goal they could get it to work still.