Seite 5: Diskussion Kirk vs. Slusallek

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Inhaltsverzeichnis

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Einleitung
Ray tracing or rasterization?

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Perfect effects

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5

Game development

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Ray tracing in today GPUs

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Game development

GameStar: Game development consumes more and more time and money. Ray tracing can ease the development process via performing pixel processing and collision detection in one pass. Can ray tracing give the developers more time for making better games or are they happy with doing all these tricks for this and that?

Kirk:
I don't agree with the premise of the question. Very little time is now spent by developers in creating the rendering part of the game engine, so ray tracing won't help that. Most time is spent creating the "look" of the shaders and the characters, the models, and the definitions of the materials and environments. Rendering is relatively easy.

Slusallek: Rendering with Rasterization is all but easy if you want to do anything more than drawing simple textured triangles. Too many PhD students have spend way too much of their time improving shadow tricks for rasterization -- and its still does not work correctly. The same is true for many other effects.

Even worse is that each of these tricks has limitations and often interferes with other tricks. Game designers must always keep these limitations in mind when designing content instead of concentrating on their real job -- creating the best gaming environment. There is a reason that people like John Carmack are complaining that content creation is getting too difficult and time consuming and are looking for better alternatives.

In ray tracing all that needs to be done is sending one or more rays, which can be completely done in hardware and does not involve the application at all. The application simply defines the appearance of surfaces via small shader programs and the ray tracing engine does all the rest.

On a per pixel basis a ray tracer even combines the appearances (shaders) of multiple objects automatically and in the correct way whenever necessary, e.g. when seeing the semi-transparent shadow of a translucent object being reflected in a bump-mapped surface. There is nothing the application or a shader writer has to do as the ray tracer
automatically and correctly simulates the light traveling through this environment.

With rasterization each different combination of effects would require its own complex programming both at the shader and the application level. You better don't ask how much special effects programming is involved in some of the great demos that you see showing off the latest graphics cards.