Nvidia demonstrated their GPU powered realtime ray-tracing engine on August 15th. Running at 30+FPS. Claimed to be the worlds first fully interactive GPU based ray-tracing engine. Not a very usable solution though seeing as its running on a $10,000+ Quadro Plex, but we are getting there.
Nvidia claims that it’s just demonstrated ‘the world’s first fully interactive GPU-based ray tracer’ at the show, which was achieved using a Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (VCS) containing four Quadro GPUs, each with 1GB of memory.
Nvidia says that ‘the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application.’ Impressively, Nvidia claims that the polished car demo runs at 30fps at 1,920 x 1,080, and includes ‘an image-based lighting paint shader, ray traced shadows, and reflections and refractions’ at three bounces.
Nvidia also demonstrated the demo running at 2,560 x 1,600, although frame rates have not been revealed at this resolution.
This video shows a progression of ray-traced shaders executing on a cluster of IBM QS20 Cell blades. The model comprises over 300,000 triangles and renders at over 60 frames per second, depending on the shader, at 1080p resolution using 14 Cell processors. Because of the scalable nature of the ray-tracer it can also render interactive frames on a single Linux Playstation3 using only 6 SPEs.
Edit: Here is a high resolution copy of the video, sans the guy talking
IBM Interactive Ray-tracer (iRT) using three Sony Playstation3s (PS3) to render a model that is 75x more complex then those used in today’s games. Ray-tracing is the rendering technique used by the film industry and is considered to complex for today’s game systems. The code was written using IBM Cell SDK 2.0 on Linux. The iRT is totally scalable and only requires one Cell SPE to run. More PS3s = More SPEs = Higher client frame rates. All images are at least 720p 4x multi-sampled, with dynamic light sources, procedurally generated atmosphere, and dynamic shadows.
Not only is a cluster of only 3 machines impressive, they did this with only access to the Cell processor as the RSX GPU on the PS3 is still inaccessible.
Welcome to the Interactive Realtime Ray-tracing news blog. The home of the the rarely updated iRTRT world. Though I will try my best to find the latest updates.
