Re:800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime Ray Tracing
by nvoorhies on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @02:49PM
(#694415)
Automotive applications are different in that they're inordinately concerned with the appearance of reflections, especially in areas such as the appearance of the headlights. This makes non-raytraced approaches substantially less valuable in the design process. They really want to know what the shiny bits will look like ahead of time.
Raytracing still suffers form the performance implications of incoherent memory accesses patterns for non-primary rays, but when you want physically correct reflections and shadowing to fall out of the rendering architecture naturally, an implementation of ray tracing in hardware starts to look like a pretty spiffy idea.
Are there other fields that require physically correct models for reflections, etc? None spring to mind for me right away.
Re:800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime Ray Tracing
by profquail on Wednesday July 08, 2009 @08:06PM
(#694940)
Designing lenses and mirrors for things like telescopes and lasers, I'd imagine.
Also, a slight adaptation could be good for radiation and electromagnetic research (e.g. how well a material blocks beta radiation, etc.)
The realm of realtime computer graphics has been totally dominated by the SGI+Renderman line of thinking, and realtime raytracing has only made occassional appearances in demos or academic research (and possibly the pipe dreams of Intel executives wishing for a disruptive technology to make up for their weakness in graphics).
It's fascinating that they're willing to build custom chips for this purpose. Are Toyota's needs simply so advanced that they couldn't do anything else? Or will this be another Cell processor type project, a chip launched with high hopes and only one major customer?