Purty!!

This showcases raytracings strengths of reflections, refractions and other light effects really well. I still think rasterised rendering is more than capable for current gaming.

>> ^Fantomas:

This showcases raytracings strengths of reflections, refractions and other light effects really well. I still think rasterised rendering is more than capable for current gaming.


I tend to agree, but ray tracing has always been the holy grail in both visual quality...and attainability. For what I remember when I cared, accelerating such a process is rather difficult. I believe, though, rasterisation is still done in "ray tracing" environments, but the lighting model is pure ray tracing; which I believe is a recent break through in rolling out ray tracing engines (see photon mapping). Time to google more ray tracing stuff, forgot how pretty it was

Get the feeling the focal depth is also acting as optimisation as well though. The amount of in focus geometry is pretty low.

I guess we're still quite far from anything large scale but it's good to see progress.

Looks nice too

video is private????? Cannot watch! *dead

Invocations (dead) cannot be called by swedishfriend because swedishfriend is not privileged - sorry.

Fixed. Cheers.>> ^swedishfriend:

video is private????? Cannot watch! dead

*engineering

Adding video to channels (Engineering) - requested by Trancecoach.

It's undoubtedly pretty, but I'm unsure of it's usefulness in games. There's a whole bunch of rigid bodies interacting, but no deformation, and given that most games tend to model people, that's kind of a problem.

Would probably make for an awesome space sim though.

*animation

Adding video to channels (Animation) - requested by nomino.

Man, Bejeweled 4 is going to KILL.

that's ray traced!

wow, i remember trying raytrace software on my atari st.. a ball and two light sources.. took an entire night to render one frame.

I want that chess set.

I'd like to see a version without nearly as much depth of field blurring.

Not ray-tracing, just standard DX11 rastering with lots of post-processing. This is what it takes for real-time raytracing currently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2VB8vGIbwY

Yep, this is not actually "ray-tracing" as it is traditionally implied. The same way that most reflections you see in any game today are not actually reflections. Developers find all sorts of tricks to optimize the calculations involved, and once you begin to do that you're no longer in the definition of ray-tracing.
It would be more appropriate to call this simulated ray-tracing.

Whatever the technique, it's fantastic. Now give me a virtual weapon and let me chase people around this board killing them.

THERE'S TWO CURSOR IN MY SCREEN!

*brain explodes

Invocations (brain) cannot be called by Zaibach because Zaibach is not privileged - sorry.

It's nice. Unfortunately, visuals are not currently what's holding games back. It's interaction, especially in the large-scope AAA titles. I'd give up at least 10 years of visual development for some decent AI in games, especially when it comes to believable characters... Not a fair comparison of course, but I do feel increased realism on the graphics side makes the rest of games' limitations so much more obvious.

>> ^L0cky:

Get the feeling the focal depth is also acting as optimisation as well though. The amount of in focus geometry is pretty low.

The amount of geometry is low, focused or not. I bet the background is just an image, probably mapped to the inside of a giant sphere.

If it wasn't, it wouldn't help that it's blurry. If you're raytracing, you've still got to do all the same calculations to areas that are out of focus that you do to areas that are in focus. The depth of field is calculated by your virtual camera/lense.

As I said, this is probably just a picture on a surface in the background and it's probably blurred solely for the purpose of keeping you from noticing.