Completely raytraced 3D shooter

[Devilphish]

Until now every 3D Shooter has been completly rendered in software or using common rasterization hardware. As a scientific study Saarland University developed in cooperation with Erlangen University the worlds first completly ray traced 3D Shooter.

http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~sidapohl/egoshooter/


"about 20 fps@36 GHz in 512x512 with 4xFSAA"
:O :O :O

 

[Top Secret]

What does "Ray traced 3d shooter" mean? That everything was 'rendered' using only CPU power and not a video card? I'm confused, hehe.

*Edit*

They must have done something to the game though, the shadows are 100x better than standard Q3 engine. :afro:

*Edit2*

Or did they just port Q3 to the ray trace engine?

 

[blahblahblah]

take a look at the screenshots at the site. You will see why that is so impressive.

This is realtime speed for a virtual intel CPU with about 36 GHz (to be more precise: a cluster with 20 AMD XP1800 was used). Alternativly one slow PC (1 GHz) with a hardware raytrace GPU that is 3 times more powerful then an actual prototpye could be used.

Raytracing has to deal with the way the lighting is done (and the shadows).

 

[OCybrManO]

It means all of the lighting was done by tracing individual light rays (like in fancy 3D renders) instead of using hacks like lightmaps, stencil shadows, etc to increase performance at the cost of image quality... and, yes, it was being rendered by the CPU.

 

[Devilphish]

:naughty: I dunno I found this:

Ray Tracing is a global illumination based rendering method. It traces rays of light from the eye back through the image plane into the scene. Then the rays are tested against all objects in the scene to determine if they intersect any objects. If the ray misses all objects, then that pixel is shaded the background color. Ray tracing handles shadows, multiple specular reflections, and texture mapping in a very easy straight-forward manner.

It doesn't look any better than the Doom3 or Unreal3 engines, but I figured it was a rather interesting technical achievement. The screens don't do it justice, you should download the movie. Some of it is somewhat ugly infact, I would much rather play Quake3 in the Doom3 engine. But as I said from a technical standpoint I thought it was interesting. I would like to have a gaming rig with that kind of power though :O

 

[OCybrManO]

Quake 3 wasn't made to show off that technology, unlike everything you see in Doom 3 and Unreal 3. (whoa... three 3's) One major difference is the lack of normal maps (or those faked displacement shaders in Unreal 3) on all of the surfaces.

 

[scribblehead]

nicely done, but i wonder if editing the crap out of that engine is legal

j/k

 

[LittleB]

Wow, 36 Ghz, that's badass. I always knew with enough computing power shit like this would become possible.


btw, this is what happens if you give a bunch of nerds way too much money.

 

[CrazyHarij]

Doubt anyone will buy it, that's the problem.

 

[Razor]

So it is just Quake3 using Ray Tracing, impressive lighting and shadows but it is still only Quake3.