nexus_alpha
Newcomer
Ray tracing on radeon 9700
- Thread starter nexus_alpha
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That is pretty old "news" as can be read from the publishing date. Also that ray tracer was beaten by CPU tracers back then in both speed and flexibility. From what I know this situation hasn't changed any better for GPUs. Perhaps in a generation or two we could finally see that GPUs can do better than CPUs. Though Larrabee will likely be ready by then and it's kind of difficult to define what it is 
As I said, it is slower and far less flexible compared to general CPUs, at least when non-trivial scenes are being rendered. For tracing a few spheres GPU can do quite well but this is not what it should aim for. Scenes with complicated geometry and moving objects is where things should be researched. Current GPUs aren't all that efficient in that, at least not when compared to what can be done on CPUs
Jawed
Legend
I think this is better (not just because it runs on X1900XTX):
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/i3dkdtree/
the video is prolly the most useful introduction.
As well as pure ray tracing on the GPU, they also use GPU rasterisation to obviate the first ray. Mike Houston provides a summary here:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=894577&postcount=4
Jawed
http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/i3dkdtree/
the video is prolly the most useful introduction.
As well as pure ray tracing on the GPU, they also use GPU rasterisation to obviate the first ray. Mike Houston provides a summary here:
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=894577&postcount=4
Jawed
