PowerVR Wizard GPU does real-time ray tracing at 10x lower power than Nvidia GTX

Re:PowerVR Wizard GPU does real-time ray tracing at 10x lowe... by askee on Thursday January 07, 2016 @02:55PM (#10860273)

Rasterization also is of highly-parallelizable nature and this parallelism has been exploited to great effect in the last decade(s). Given that Ray Tracing's only advantage over Rasterization is specular reflection it seems unlikely it is really superior in terms of efficiency. Especially since specular reflections and many other effects can be achieved via cheating in Rasterization.

For real GI, Path Tracing, Photon Mapping and so on are the methods of choice and not Ray Tracing.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:PowerVR Wizard GPU does real-time ray tracing at 10x lowe... by namuol on Thursday January 07, 2016 @03:54PM (#10860663)

Global Illumination, Path Tracing, Photon Mapping and Ray Tracing all belong to a category of algorithms that are better suited for multi-core general processors -- not the SIMD hardware of today's GPUs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:PowerVR Wizard GPU does real-time ray tracing at 10x lowe... by dogma1138 on Thursday January 07, 2016 @04:10PM (#10860784)

GPU's haven't stuck to SIMD parallelism for quite a few years now. NVIDIA is not there yet SMT/DPT isn't true parallelism but it's good enough even for path tracing. AMD GPU's are pretty much truly parallel with every execution unit capable of executing any instruction asynchronously.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:PowerVR Wizard GPU does real-time ray tracing at 10x lowe... by elihu on Thursday January 07, 2016 @07:34PM (#10862022)

Ray tracing has other advantages besides shiny reflections: it can handle refraction, shadows, non-triangle-based geometric primitives (including CSG), and has less sensitivity to the total amount of geometry in a scene.

Global illumination is where we want to go to surpass the realism of current games, but path tracing and photon mapping are both fundamentally based on ray-tracing. Any hardware that makes ray-tracing go faster (especially for incoherent rays) should also help to speed up global illumination.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:PowerVR Wizard GPU does real-time ray tracing at 10x lowe... by texelsoup on Thursday January 07, 2016 @10:55PM (#10862822)

Their hardware actually combines hardware rasterization and raytracing.

Depending on the implementation, raytracing can have many benefits over rasterization, such as: - ability to produce pixel-perfect shadows - sub-linear complexity on the amount of primitives (vs. linear for rasterization) - rays need not be coherent, i.e one can render non-linear projections or lots of small views

Path Tracing also is just another form of Raytracing. They demonstrated that their hardware can be used for it (just read the link).

[ Parent | on HN ]