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Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

bytecellar.com

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Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

#41

Post by ksec »

bitL wrote: post #3

Can someone from AMD/NVidia please jump in and explain the difference between Radeon Rays (2016?) and RTX (2018)? Thanks!

And if someone from Game development communities could explain how hard is it to do RTX or DirectX RT on current games? Would companies now have to do two set of graphics, design, and code path? One that does it with DirectX RT the other doing it with all the Rasterisation technique such as Shadow mapping etc.

Basically I am interested in the Cost of such Direct X RT implementation. And what sort of time frame could we see these on the market.

Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

#42

Post by blakespot »

jdmoreira wrote: post #37

Sure, but real-time raytracing at home is quite a new thing and that's what the hype is about. Right?

Yes, as I explain in the article. I kept coming across media calling ray tracing a new technique, in articles about the RTX boards. I responded to a few and thought I'd talk about it on the blog. Enjoying ray traced animations (pre-rendered) on the Amiga was a thrill for me back in the old days, and so it felt a good fit for my vintage computing blog.

Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

#44

Post by blakespot »

bni wrote: post #32

Im an Amiga fan but in what way is the Juggler demo relevant here at all? Ray tracing and storing the 2D result, was surely done much earlier on workstations from SGI, Sun etc

I wrote this article. The Juggler was the first time I'd seen raytracing on a computer and watching these pre-rendered animations on the Amiga was one of the thrills of the system, as it surpassed all consumer micros of the day graphically, as far as on-screen colors. The Amiga's Hold-And-Modify (HAM) mode could render the full 4096-color palette on-screen and was very well suited for displaying ray traced scenes with their realistic coloring and shading and could do so at a resolution of 320x400 (4:3 aspect) and at a sufficient framerate, given the flexibility and power of the Amiga's blitter and memory architecture. As such, it seemed worth a mention here.

Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

#45

Post by ctrl-j »

toolslive wrote: post #38
ctrl-j wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your qualm with calling ray-tracing physically based? Don't most models even include transmissivity and refraction? I mean, unless you're expecting them to calculate absorption/re-emission at every bounce... It still seems pretty "physical" to me.

Here you're using geometrical optics which models is a narrow beam (ray) which is idealized as a line. It all becomes simple vector math form there onwards. However, Physics knows since the end of the 18th century light is a wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young%27s_interference_experim... It's not that the model breaks down only in extreme conditions (like Newton's laws of mechanices), but in day to day situatio…

The wave-like nature of photons does not exclude the particle behavior. Light is both a particle and a wave.

Physicists still rely on snells law. Optics courses still includes path tracing when studying refraction and dielectrics.

Excluding the particle behavior of light just because the wave nature exists, is not something a physicist would do.

Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

#47

Post by toolslive »

ctrl-j wrote: post #45
toolslive wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you're using geometrical optics which models is a narrow beam (ray) which is idealized as a line. It all becomes simple vector math form there onwards. However, Physics knows since the end of the 18th century light is a wave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young%27s_interference_experim... It's not that the model breaks down only in extreme conditions (like Newton's laws of mechanices), but in day to day situatio…

The wave-like nature of photons does not exclude the particle behavior. Light is both a particle and a wave. Physicists still rely on snells law. Optics courses still includes path tracing when studying refraction and dielectrics. Excluding the particle behavior of light just because the wave nature exists, is not something a physicist would do.

True, but the concept of ray used here is neither particle nor wave. The whole thing is way more geometry than physics.

Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

#49

Post by blakespot »

vvilliam0 wrote: post #39

Obviously. Good article but clickbait title. "A History of Ray Tracing" would have done the job.

What prompted me to write the article was running across several tech news articles declaring ray tracing to be a new technique on pieces about the RTX hardware -- real-time aside. To clarify that ray tracing is not new but real-time ray tracing (generally) is was my purpose in writing the piece.

Re: Ray Tracing Is No New Thing

#50

Post by neetdavid »

vvilliam0 wrote: post #39

Obviously. Good article but clickbait title. "A History of Ray Tracing" would have done the job.

Can we retire calling things clickbait?

The post does cover the history but it is a response to coverage like this: "...a new graphics rendering technique called ray tracing."

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