SEGA Developing MODEL 4 In Conjunction With Saarland University?

[TEXAN*]

Found the following over at NeoGAF.

WORLD EXCLUSIVE FIRST DETAILS ON SEGA'S MODEL 4 ARCADE BOARD

06/12/09 FGNOnline can officially reveal for the very first time in this world exclusive that SEGA has begun development on the fourth system in the MODEL series of arcade boards.

Details are currently thin however we can share with you the following early preliminary information.

Unlike Model 1, Model 2 & Model 3, which were based on rasterization, Model 4 is designed for fast real-time ray tracing. The system shall exclude rasterization capability.

It is our understanding that SEGA has partnered with Japan based Fujitsu Limited and Saarland University of Germany for the development of the board. Our sources indicate that the company shall use a version of Fujitsu's new Venus processor as the Central processing unit and also multiple custom designed DRPU's from Saarland University.

SEGA plans on deploying the first game using the technology by summer 2011. Until then SEGA's software output shall be designed for the RINGEDGE/RINGWIDE.

Currently this is all the information that we currently posses however stay tuned in the coming months as we unravel more on SEGA's long awaited Model 4, the world's first real-time raytracing system.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=365059

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Neogaf is quoting a dubious website. A website that's also being mentioned in conjunction with a new XB. Seems like a bunkem rumour-mill website trying to drum up hits, which its doing very well, and there's nothing really to discuss.

 

[TEXAN*]

But what if it's true?

Could you imagine the impact this would have?

If it's true, then when SEGA announces it you're not just going to hear it in the gaming press it'll be on every mainstream news broadcast on the planet from BBC to CNN.

Ray Tracing, fully interactive, in realtime, for the first time in history. It will cause shockwaves.

5,000+ news links over at google news. Easy.

 

[I.S.T.]

It's not going to be true, that's the point. The site that posted it has little credibility, and the technical challenges it would have to overcome are at this point in time incredibly difficult to work around.

As a side note, didn't you used to have an old account here, TEXAN*? I recognize you from my lurking days several years ago.

 

[Weaste]

The entire idea of using a SPARC derivative in this makes it highly dubious in my opinion.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Real-time raytracing isn't going to happen. If it is, that same level of performance could be directed into a standard scanline renderer and produce far better looking results! Ray-tracing is a niche technology with niche applications. For high-performance realtime graphics it's a long way from being a suitable alternative to traditional methods.

Given that their arcade hardwares to date have been generally mediocre spec, what possible reason is there to think they're going to buck the trend of a declining industry and created a new, pioneering technology showcase at considerable cost, instead of use cheap off-the-shelf PC parts?

 

[Nesh]

Interestingly enough Saarland University has been contacting research on Ray tracing hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)

The OpenRT project includes a highly-optimized software core for ray tracing along with an OpenGL-like API in order to offer an alternative to the current rasterisation based approach for interactive 3D graphics. Ray tracing hardware, such as the experimental Ray Processing Unit developed at the Saarland University, has been designed to accelerate some of the computationally intensive operations of ray tracing. On March 16, 2007, the University of Saarland revealed an implementation of a high-performance ray tracing engine that allowed computer games to be rendered via ray tracing without intensive resource usage.[10]

If true then Saarland sounds like a good candidate for such a technology. If not then the rumor starter knows how to make rumors

 

[TEXAN*]

As a side note, didn't you used to have an old account here, TEXAN*? I recognize you from my lurking days several years ago.

Yes, that would be me.

 

[TEXAN*]

Interestingly enough Saarland University has been contacting research on Ray tracing hardware.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)



If true then Saarland sounds like a good candidate for such a technology. If not then the rumor starter knows how to make rumors

You are indeed correct.

Read page 47 onwards in the following PDF -

http://www.zgdv.de/gamedays2007/Pages/Talks/Slusallek.pdf

EDIT: LINK IS NO LONGER WORKING

 

[Boxercide]

But what if it's true?

Could you imagine the impact this would have?

If it's true, then when SEGA announces it you're not just going to hear it in the gaming press it'll be on every mainstream news broadcast on the planet from BBC to CNN.

Ray Tracing, fully interactive, in realtime, for the first time in history. It will cause shockwaves.

5,000+ news links over at google news. Easy.

What if my unicorn can only eat the leaves of my gold tree and drink from my fountain of eternal youth?

 

[obonicus]

If true then Saarland sounds like a good candidate for such a technology. If not then the rumor starter knows how to make rumors

Or he could search for published articles on 'raytracing hardware' and look at the authors -- you don't even need to read them, you just needs the abstracts.

 

[Megadrive1988]

*the arcade market is not big enough to justify a massively powerful cutting-edge new arcade board. Especially not in this economy.

*real-time RayTracing via hardware probably has a long, LONG way to go before it's viable and practical for games. It's probably more than 2 years away, so beyond 2011, and well into the next decade.

*a Model4 board using conventional rasterisation was in development by LMC R3D in the 90s after Model3, but never came to light.

 

[Tahir2]

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/94/

Ray tracing isn't the holy grail of real-time rendering-- it should be obvious that it has serious problems of its own to conquer, like rasterisation, before it can offer acceptable real-time image quality. Despite what a lot of the current press seems to suggest, though, the two techniques aren't mutually exclusive in the first place.

A hybrid approach will probably offer the best of both worlds. Many ray tracers already replace primary rays with rasterisation and only compute secondary rays through traditional ray tracing. The ability to spawn rays in the GPU's shader core would solve many hard problems that rasterisation engines have to face. There certainly seems to be no major image quality advantage to moving to a ray tracer for a large portion of the common realistic scenes that we want to render.

People should read the article above by Dean Calver before making stupid specs about Raytracing.

I was doing raytracing on my ATARI 520ST in the early 90's... its kinda old already unless you like shiny chocolate bouncing balls.

 

[RudeCurve]

Sony Visualizer was to be a raytracer?

 

[Thowllly]

Ray Tracing, fully interactive, in realtime, for the first time in history.

You mean, for the 428th time in history or something? Nothing new, nothing too exciting...

 

[Akumajou]

But what if it's true?

Could you imagine the impact this would have?

If it's true, then when SEGA announces it you're not just going to hear it in the gaming press it'll be on every mainstream news broadcast on the planet from BBC to CNN.

Ray Tracing, fully interactive, in realtime, for the first time in history. It will cause shockwaves.

5,000+ news links over at google news. Easy.

If and I will humor you, if it is true then Sega indeed is the head cheerleader of stupid decisions and wasting of money and wasting of time.

Sega could have partnered with Sony back in 2005 to use the Playstation 3 hardware and made far earlier claims than Guerrilla Games on using xxx% performance of CellBE, spus, RSX, defferred rendering proprietary software, ram pool, even BR to HDD performance and the gigabit network performance because Sega has always had the reputation to do something like that...

Instead of taking the Microsoft Direct X programming reliance, dependence it has taken with their Lindbergh, to Ringedge crap arcade hardware that is holding their programmers back.

 

[grandmaster]

The whole notion is a complete nonsense for one very simple reason, and it isn't even technical. There isn't a market in the arcades any more capable of sustaining this level of hardware for the amount of revenue it will generate.

The lion's share of any revenue an arcade game generates comes from the home versions on console. So why bother creating a bespoke hardware completely incompatible with home hardware?

RingEdge simply bears this out.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Good point! SEGA's creations will need to be readily portable, and a completely alien renderer doesn't facilitate that.

 

[nbohr1more]

My useless 2 cents: The Pong (or maybe something beyond Pong) arcade game essentially created the Arcade phenomenon by offering a device that was not available to home consumers. If a company felt there was an opportunity to produce something that is radically different from what is available to home consumers they could postulate an Arcade rebirth. SEGA would be the most likely company in this bizarre scenario as they are one of the last arcade hold-outs with their novelty controller games (Fire Fighting etc). It would also be suitably Japanese (a slow smoldering plan that defies conventional corporate motives: See the rebirth of SNK)... Not that I lend much credence to the idea... But compelling nonetheless...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That is a valid speculation. The rumour should tie them into a 3D holographic display though, to get that 'new experience' that won't translate to the home environment