Ray-traced Quake Wars
News
Posted June 13th, 2008 at 4:00pm
by Devin Kent
Intel has just finished up a modification to Enemy Territory: Quake Wars that allows the engine to use ray-tracing rather than the traditional hodgepodge of methods used in other games. In most games, programmers use a variety of different tricks to determine, for instance, the opacity or transparency of objects, what the player can and can’t see, reflections, etc., mostly centered around the z-buffering algorithm. With ray-tracing, millions of simulated rays of light are shot out of each light source. Each ray, or photon, is then tracked along its path. This method can very accurately determine reflection (how many photons bounce off an object), transparency (how many pass through vs. how many are absorbed), and refraction (how the photons’ paths are bent as they pass through an object). The upshot of this is that most objects look only slightly better, but anything involving glass or water looks orders of magnitude more real, as you can see from the screenshots in the article.
Don’t get your hopes up that you’ll be running this version anytime soon, though. Using a 16-core (4 socket, 4 core) Tigerton system running at 2.93 GHz, Intel was only able to achieve between 10-25 FPS. Ray-tracing is not an easy task.
3D rendering, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, intel, prototype, ray-tracing
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