Elite Force Raytracing Demo

[Genesis6100]

How do you raytrace?

[msqrt]

@Genesis6100 Lots of math. Basically cast a ray for every pixel on screen, calculate where it's going and where it hits surfaces. Take the nearest hit, that's your object. Now you can go on and calculate texture coordinates and cast rays to lights to see if the surface is lit and how brightly (if the primary hit to light ray is occluded, it's not litten, otherwise normal lighting stuff)

Good for reflections, refractions and stuff, can render infinitely smooth objects, slow as hell. Usually.

[PPKproductions3]

@msqrt So what tool do you use to raytrace then?

[msqrt]

@PPKproductions3 Well, most offline 3D renderers (renderman, vray, mental ray, the ones that come with modeling software) are ray tracers. Or you can write your own, which is somewhat challenging but fun.

[Dth091]

@msqrt yafray is a nice raytracer.

[Dth091]

@msqrt slow as hell because there are no GPUs that are specifically designed for it. GPUs nowadays mainly do rasterisation, but raytracing can be done in parallel to that so you could make a GPU that has the capabilities for both.

[DEFECTX9]

Fail. Raytracing fails it will NEVER beat tenselation and thats a fact

[FOGoticus]

@DEFECTX9 Wait you don't understand what tessellation is and what ray tracing and advanced ray tracing is.

Tessellation just models and supra models.

Ray tracing makes some realistic lights.

And advanced ray tracing makes most of the things look real.

[DEFECTX9]

@FOGoticus i do and it isent real looking, looks like plastic. Tessellation Is the Best looking. Case closed

[FOGoticus]

@DEFECTX9 nope.... you added tessellation here for no reason.... I mean, just adding ray tracing here and tesselation would look awesome. It's just usless.

And no. They will not disable ray tracing or advanced ray tracing for tessellation.

[DEFECTX9]

@FOGoticus Yes Tessellation is Advanced Ray tracing

[FOGoticus]

@DEFECTX9 Lol.... you really have to study dude.

Advanced ray tracing just makes shiny things look real.

Tessellation just takes the normal map and turns it into a model.

Can't you just get it those 2 have almost nothing in common?

[DEFECTX9]

@FOGoticus Taci, tu non sai un cazzo

[redleg70]

There's something missing on a lot of these that I've seen. I think it's something regarding the textures. Perhaps the textures that looked OK with the old engines are too low-resolution for this sort of thing. Or there's a uniformity of surface characteristics, specularity and so on, that's now apparent...

[Zauron3ooo]

Do you even know what raytracing is? It doesn't sound like it since specular are another effect who pretty much stays the same with or without raytracing

[wuhlei]

so the map was recompiled with out shadows and its all being generated?

[wuhlei]

whats your video card? thats whats doing all the ray tracing right?

[OnionMad]

no, it's actually the CPU in these old demos.

because it's MUCH easier to program a code that's executable through the SSE2/4 (cpu) than the shader-processors in the gpu. also, this wouldn't have been possible untill the launch of DX10, witch included unified shaders wich makes the developers able to execute pretty much anything through the SP's

[wuhlei]

does this only work in windows?

[OnionMad]

i think so. maybe you can emulate it on a mac, idk, but if you could, it would probably lagg like shit

[wuhlei]

if the cpu is doing the ray tracing then isn't it being emulated?

[OnionMad]

i'm not that good on that stuff.... this "demo" will be cpu-bound no matter how you do. emulated or not.

[wuhlei]

lol I'm not either thats why I'm asking all these stupid questions still cool

[d3d3d3dw]

Nice to see some realtime RT engines. Good work 5 stars.

[theamusementmachine]

looks good!

[dimamolodec]

haha:) yea!!! "VERY GOOD"