Quake Wars: Ray Traced

Quake Wars: Ray Traced
Original author(s) Intel Corporation
Type ray tracing rendering engine
License proprietary?
Website www.qwrt.de
Quake Wars: Ray Traced

Quake Wars: Ray Traced is a research project from Intel Corporation that applied a ray tracing renderer to the game content of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The possibility of using ray tracing for this game in real-time has been demonstrated first on servers and after further progress later on workstations[1] and last on an early prototype of the Larrabee hardware.[2] After Quake 3: Ray Traced and Quake 4: Ray Traced this is the third large project that embeds this technique in a modern game for research purposes of alternative rendering algorithms. A successor of this project Wolfenstein: Ray Traced has been created in 2010.

Since 3D graphics hardware accelerators have become popular in regular desktop computers the rendering algorithm of commercial computer games has been limited to the rasterisation technology that has certain advantages, but also limitations.

Improvements through using ray tracing

Force field shader
Ray traced water
Total internal reflection seen under the water
Reflecting scope of sniper rifle
Dome made out of glass
Camera portals in camera portals

Challenges using ray tracing

Performance

There cannot be an apple-to-apples performance comparison between the original and the ray traced version due to the additional special effects, but in general the frame rates on the original, rasterized version are several factors higher and usually over 100 frames per second on high-end graphics cards of 2009.[8] The reported performance numbers in a resolution of 1280×720 of the ray traced version have been given for a variety of systems:[1]

Performance hot spots marked during rendering. Red costs more performance than blue.

Transparencies

In the traditional rasterization approach transparent objects can be rendered comparably fast. In the implementation of Quake Wars: Ray Traced objects like trees, that are simulated through multiple partially transparent quad surfaces have been performance intensive to render.

Video

Quake Wars Ray Traced

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Friday, January 16, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.