News Gelsinger kicks off IDF Shanghai with Larrabee

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/04/02/gelsinger_kicks_off_idf_shanghai_with_larrabee/1

IDF SPRING 08: Pat Gelsinger kicked off IDF this morning with talk about how he believes Larrabee will change the visual computing industry.

 

I'm looking forward to a review of this, see how it stacks up to the likes of nVida and AMD.

p.s. Article doesn't link here yet. Does now ignore me

 

sounds good, but games will have to be made differently to take advantage and how it performs with "regularly" coded games remains unknown especially considering that Intel never really mentioned that scenario...

 

is raytracing really the way to go?

AFAIK from my graphics courses, raytracing in its basic form (which is really the only one becoming vaguely feasible in realtime at the moment) is remarkably artificial-looking, due to its ability to only model specular-specular light interaction from point-sources (ie, no soft shadowing, no colour bleeding between diffuse surfaces, no BRDF sampling for glossy surfaces, and generally no awesome light effects in general). In order to do anything better, you either have to add some cheating based on current techniques, or increase your complexity by a couple orders of magnitude and throw a few hundred to a thousand rays per pixel down the line, adding path tracing to the mix (basically ray tracing on steroids, but diffuse-diffuse paths are accounted for, as well as BRDF sampling and area light sources for soft shadows).

I mean, this is what i know from about a year ago; can someone shed some light on this?

 

I don't believe it is the way to go.. Intel would like it to be used exclusively, but it never will be - it'll become 'another tool' for developers.

 

I can't offer any insight into the subtleties of ray-tracing.. But I can vouch for the ever increasing processing power of graphics, cpu's etc. if we dare to talk about 10-15 years in the future, surely ray-tracing would be the holy grail all graphics would converge towards? Can raster keep it up?

 

I believe your right, and i don't understand why ray tracing is so hyped, from what Ive read, its makes good pictures, but their far less realistic (for example, due to the fact ray tracing doesn't work out shadows (i believe))

 

Ray tracing works out 'perfect' shadows, but to get the same kind of 'realism' you get from modern raster based graphics you have to calculate many 'bounces' of the light rays - which is very computationally expensive. One solution is to reduce the number of bounces to get a good enough approximation, but you still run into issues with soft bodies and particle effects such as fog or fire that are traditionally rendered by shaders rather than as physical entities within a scene. If you can throw enough horsepower towards the task you could get more and more realistic looking results by increasing the complexity of the ray traced scene, but the demands for compute power is exponential to the results.

Given a fixed current level of compute power you would achieve better results using raster based techniques, but as diminishing returns kicks in for raster techniques, ray tracing would still have huge potential for improvement - and given enough compute power a ray tracing solution would garner better results than a raster based one. We're a long way away from such a time when there enough 'disposable' computing power however to make ray tracing the better choice for gaming however, even if the current developments are promising. Think of them as laying a path for the future, rather than overnight replacing traditional techniques and you won't be dissapointed.