[sldev] Re: [VWR] Real-time Raytracing

Argent Stonecutter secret.argent at gmail.com
Sat Sep 22 13:07:05 PDT 2007


Dzonatas notes:
> "Rendering Games with Raytracing Will Revolutionize Graphics"
>
> http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=455&type=expert&pid=1

Old news. Philipp Slusallek has been pushing this for years. He had  
an FPGA hardware raytracer that was doing 7M rays/sec on a 66 MHz  
FPGA with 6M gates in 2005. Got a lot of pushback from nVidia and ATI  
over this, which is a pity, but I just got mail from him that both  
ATI and nVidia are adding RT acceleration to future GPUs... though  
nothing as aggressive as his SaarCOR prototype.

An 8800 runs at, what, 400 MHZ and has 600M transistors. Given how  
parallelizable raytracing is a dedicated raytracer with a similar  
budget should blow past the magic billion rays a second without  
difficulty... and be a lot cheaper and use less power than an 8 core  
CPU.

http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~slusallek/



More information about the SLDev mailing list