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

[Lawson English]

Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> 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/
>
How compatible would the already-built SL content be for a ray-traced 
based viewer? Would everything have to be pre-converted, 
converted-on-the-fly, or do existing ray-tracing algorithms handle 
OpenGL geometry already?

L.