Intel man touts real-time ray-tracing

11 Oct 2007 | 13:27 BST

By Wily Ferret

ONE OF INTEL'S gaming gurus has put finger to keypad and come up with a blog entry on how Intel's multi-core CPUs could mean the final days for GPUs.

The crux of the argument is that ray-tracing is the future of video game graphics. Whilst GPUs are great rasterisation cores, CPUs are more suited to ray-tracing. Since ray-tracing games allows for better/faster/more realistic graphics scenes, this means that Intel is on course for world domination.

The argument is compelling. Real-time ray-tracing has been considered the holy grail of graphics rendering for many years now. The news, presented at IDF last month, that Intel's team had managed to port Quake IV to a dedicated ray-tracing engine was no insignificant announcement.

There's just one problem. The Quake IV demo required an eight-core X86 chip - probably two years out - and was running a gaming engine that's two years old. That's a delta of four years in terms of performance needed in hardware and performance supplied by the gaming engine. Intel has to be betting its hand that it can produce more CPU cores faster than game developers can create new game engines. That's a pretty heated race given the pace of development on both sides.

What's for sure is that Crysis will need a good 16 cores or so to get a decent frame rate when it comes to ray-tracing it. And that is sure as heck not about to land on any gamer's desktop anytime soon. Ray-tracing might be the future, but we suspect Nvidia and ATI have things sew up for a while yet. µ

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