   Future of graphics hardware
  I have been thinking about lately about the future of graphics hardware, longer term than just the next batch of Nvidia ATI cards. I for one hate the current phase they are in and as a result prefer to tinker with software rendering, as i am only really doing that -- tinkering, i am never going to end up in the game industry (well not directly my dream job is as an engineer for Nvidia or ATI).What do you guys think about the long term future ( 5->10 years) of GPU's and i mean GPU's in a broad sense.?What about RPU's (ray processing units). If you had say 4 decent sized FPGA's running in parallel at like 100 Mhz crunching rays, you could properly real-time raytrace.What i would like to see in new cards would be the ability to do some fundamental operation (trace a ray, draw a scanline) really fast and leave the rest to the software. Needless to say you would have to batch these operations for memory bandwidth and parallelism's sake. I problem i see with ray tracing hardware is the need for vast amounts of fast memory on card, because bussing scene information would kill all chances of interactivity.Basically i think Graphics Hardware has gone the wrong direction and as a result all graphics that seem to get produced these days looks the same and there is nothing particularly exciting.Discuss   
  The biggest issue with RPUs would be insufficient (that is - unacceptable) quality of picture.Should we talk about Global Illumination Calculation Units then? :)   ;Sure if you started making the things now and tried to sell them for nanna cash, they would have crap picture quality. But not if you give it a bit of time and throw enough FPGA's at it.Aren't ray tracing and global illumination synonomous?   ;Quote:Original post by schnootleAren't ray tracing and global illumination synonomous?Nope. Raytracing is a rendering algorithm, like scanline rendering. Global illumination is an effect, one which generally refers to multiple-order reflections and participating media.schnootle, are you aware of OpenRT and SaarCOR?   ;Quote:Aren't ray tracing and global illumination synonomous?No, they are not -- this is the common misconception about RT and GI.Raytracing is nothing more than an "entry level" calculation of the energy distribution in the scene.As such it is used in most of the real-world implementations of GI, but it doesn't mean that it is the GI.Take a look on (a bit simplistic) explanation of Photon Mapping algorithm.This is the example of one of the GI algorithms.   ;  Thanks for the links sneftel and illiyada, i have come across those before. I see where you are coming from with the ray tracing versus global illumination thing, agreed you can have ray tracing without global illumination. Although you can obviously extend ray tracing to incorporate higher order physical effects.   ;Quote:Aren't ray tracing and global illumination synonomous?no but u can use raytracing in some GI methods standard raytracing doesnt do GI.u often hear about the future when we will have complicated scenes raytraced in realtime and everything will look fine and dandy, but personally raytracing is overrated.a couple of examples i can think of, i remrember recently some ppl doing quake3 raytraced with 16 pcs or this raytraced bowling game, whilst both may be good from a technical or programming standpoint, visually the quality was quite bad.i was thinking about this the other day 2 things have the most impact graphicswise.A/ lighting/shading realtime GI would be ideal but we're decades away from this (in complicated scenes)B/ correct physics. eg a static flag of a million polygons looks worse than one fluttering around with 1000 polys, the eye is attracted to movement. i believe theres gonna be some good work done with this on the cell, i've heard with MGS4 on the ps3, the main character snake has 60,000 polys for his hair, whilst i dont believe theyll be doing a phsically accurate physical simulation with it, i can see them doing 60,000 polys (i can see the cell handling that with some verlet method a piece of piss);Quote:u often hear about the future when we will have complicated scenes raytraced in realtime and everything will look fine and dandy, but personally raytracing is overrated.Why overrated? From a programmer point of view, it would simplify many of the effects than today: Once you have a HW that shoots rays and intersects them with a given geometry you can:-shadows? More rays (no VS vs. Shadowmaps again, or legal issues with Creative :-))-Reflections? more rays (no the hack usually seen until the very later days)-Refractions? more rays (not other hack or ps 3 vs. ps 2 vs. ps 1 again).It would be extremely scalable: if I buy a new craphic card I have better results (i.e, better shadows, better reflections, more depth in the recursion, more samples for some GI algorithm).It would scale better as the geometry becomes more complex.It would render many kinds of geometry (not only polygons or tesselated curves).Per pixel illuminations would be guaranteed.True GI would be only a matter of time, as the hw becomes more powerful. A question: there is someone that ever estimated how many rays could we ipotetically handle with a specific processor with the same complexity than a ati 1800 or similar? I guess that we would be not so far from hw raytracing if the same memory speed, transistors, frequency and parallel units were used in a RTRT cpu.EDIT: the RT quality should be higher than rasterization, if todays CG movies are in RT (Even pixar switched to RT, and both age of ice and robots are RT).   ;  I would like to see physics chip and maybe AI.  Maybe instead of a "video card" it would be more of a "game card" with a number of different CPUs and memory on it.   ;Quote:(Even pixar switched to RT,I thought Pixar does scanline rasterization, but all of the reflective and refractive materials use raytracing.Anyways, even in 10 years I doubt that standalone ray processing units will have any kind of market penetration. If anything along those lines occurs, I imagine it will be more like a feature of D3D11 where we can pump a scene into the API and ask for raytracing to be done for reflection/refraction. Beyond that though, I wouldn't be surprised if graphics cards become so powerful that we'll be able to do raytracing (or near-RT quality) with shaders anyways.   