Hardware & Technical For an idiot: What is ray tracing?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 110222
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Deleted member 110222

D
Am I correct in thinking it's something to do with reflections?

Or am I looking at it way too simply?

Just asking out of curiosity on how tech' is moving forward.
 

Shadowdancer

Shadowdancer
Real-time raytracing is not so much "technology moving forward" as it is "lots of old technology built really small". Heck, the old raycasting "engines" like they were used for Castle Wolfenstein 3D and the bazillion games spawned off that including such genre highlights like Noah's Ark 3D and lesser known titles like Doom are closer to raytracing than they are to the rendering methods used for modern 3D graphics, just that it's done with way fewer rays and lots of disregard for details (like for anything happening off the horizon).

And all the fast methods are doing it backwards anyway, if you want to do it right and get the benefits (*cough cough*lighting and shadows that don't look like butt), you trace the path of light from the source and that's not happening at 60 frames per second any time soon :p
 

Rustnsawdust

R
Shadowdancer said:
you trace the path of light from the source and that's not happening at 60 frames per second any time soon :p
Click to expand...

Well, that would be a major fudge [big grin]. What you need to do is trace every ray of light from every light source to every object in the frame, and then trace the reflected light rays as well, and then trace them to the camera. When I dabbled with it about 20 years ago, with, say, three light sources, it took up to an hour to render a single frame at about 1280x960 resolution. From what I've read, the new nVidia cards are doing a 'pretty good' simulation, at pretty near real time speeds. But, as Shadowdancer says, it's a long way short of full ray-tracing at 60fps.
 

Deleted member 110222

D
Patrick_68000 said:
It is a very expensive technology.

The price of RTX is here to confirm it.

:)
Click to expand...

No doubt.

Fortunately it looks like Pascal is staying until Q1 2019, giving me plenty of time to get in on the 10xx series.
 

Caramel Clown

Caramel Clown
Shadowdancer said:
Real-time raytracing is not so much "technology moving forward" as it is "lots of old technology built really small". Heck, the old raycasting "engines" like they were used for Castle Wolfenstein 3D and the bazillion games spawned off that including such genre highlights like Noah's Ark 3D and lesser known titles like Doom are closer to raytracing than they are to the rendering methods used for modern 3D graphics, just that it's done with way fewer rays and lots of disregard for details (like for anything happening off the horizon).

And all the fast methods are doing it backwards anyway, if you want to do it right and get the benefits (*cough cough*lighting and shadows that don't look like butt), you trace the path of light from the source and that's not happening at 60 frames per second any time soon :p
Click to expand...
That was ray casting I think. It only rendered parts of a scene visible from player's perspective.
 

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
For perhaps one of the earliest examples:

Amiga_The_Juggler_demo.gif
 

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
Un1k0rn said:
Any example is a useful example. :)
Click to expand...

The main thing to note here is the changing reflections, highlights and shadows as each component moves as if relative to a static light source. The ray-tracer maps the path of each photon coming from the light source, and it's interaction with whatever it hits, and renders the scene based upon that. This took a LONG time on a 68000 CPU at 7 MHz :D
 

Patrick_68000

Patrick_68000
Asp Explorer said:
The main thing to note here is the changing reflections, highlights and shadows as each component moves as if relative to a static light source. The ray-tracer maps the path of each photon coming from the light source, and it's interaction with whatever it hits, and renders the scene based upon that. This took a LONG time on a 68000 CPU at 7 MHz :D
Click to expand...

Do not laugh at the 68000 ! :mad:

:D
 

Avago Earo

Banned
Avago Earo
It has to do with the way that the banana was designed by God, in order for it to fit perfectly in the hand in order to be eaten.

Or was that a different Ray?
 
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