Well the first image uses some form of radiosity as well. You can see this if you look at the right side wall of the tunnel as it goes into the light. It isn't in direct light yet it is getting brighter from the surroundings bouncing light back to it. The second image seems to be using photon lighting, that is radiosity. You can tell this if you look at the top of the far wall where it touches the roof. There are some rendering glitches resulting in blotchy colours and lighting most likely caused by not using enough photons in the rendering.
Darg, ray-tracing doesn't just trace rays from what the ray initially impacts back to the nearest light source, it DOES do some indirect lighting. Nowhere near as much as radiosity, but it does it. Oh, and ray-tracing makes some very, very nice specular effects.
Darg you forgot that the animals did have the correct amount of light reflection/refraction for it to be ray-tracing
I think Darg needs to remember that ray-tracing's main implementation (aside from the movie Cars) has been in the Demo scene amongst teh haxxarz. Usually, all they've done is stuck orbs floating over floors with some kind of pattern on it (I've seen some ray-tracers in meh day) or other similar environments that don't do justice to ray-tracing itself. I think Darg's opinions of ray-tracing vs. radiosity have been colored by Wikipedia's lack of properly comparable pictures, and lack of performance comparisons. I'd like to thank Beerdude for bringing in some spiffy-leet pics, though. I'd like to state again, however, that the "fuzzy", "blurred", "realistic" shadows cast by dynamic lights in modern games are fakely fuzzed, blurred, and made to look realistic. I'm sure something similar could be done to ray-traced shadows to de-sharpen them. After all, to-date most in-game graphics are just a bunch of slight-of-hand, smoke-and-mirrors stuff to trick you. Ray-tracing brings us most assuredly in the right direction by making graphics less of a fakery of reality, and more of a simulation of reality.
All in all they both have their uses... BUT ONE THING STANDS NO MATTER WHAT: We will all shit our pants once either of those can be rendered at atelast 30fps per second in a full game engine... now that will be the new golden age of video gaming... *Drools at the prospects*
Actually Niarbeht I have been using raytracing and radiosity in rendering for many years now. I know what I am talking about but thank you for your opinions. The indirect lighting that you mention raytracing can perform is created by using photons. Generally 500,000 atleast is needed for a scene like the office render on the previous page. That render most likely took about 2 hours to render at the very least. If you want to wait that long for a frame to render ingame then be my guest. If you took the time to look at the raytracing games that are being worked on by some university students on the web then you'd see that what they can currently do is the bare minimum one expects from raytracing. That is reflection, refraction and accurate lighting with sharp shadows. I do not believe that it is prudent for games to go down this line of rendering at the moment simply because they can achieve far better looking games by using the current effects. And as for specularity I have to say I can't see that much of a difference in terms of quality between the latest game engines and raytracing engines. If you'd care to point out fantastic looking specularity in a raytraced render then I'll take the time to compare it with the Oblivion, Unreal 3.0 or any other modern game engine. I didn't say that the render did not use ray-tracing I said that it used a mixture of standard raytracing and some other global illumination effect either radiosity or photon lighting. I don't know what demo scene you are talking about but I have seen some fantastic renders using raytracing, I have even created many that I'd like to say were good looking. I am not saying that raytracing doesn't create fantastic looking renders but that it is not at all feasible in games at the moment. Using a modern state of the art system what could be done in a current game engine would look much much better then anything that could be rendered at the same frame rate in a game that uses ray-tracing alone. Raytracing simply takes far too much time to render any decent looking frames. Believe me Niarbeht when I say that I have not been influenced in this one bit by the wikipedia articles. I did not even read them fully. I have been working as a 3D modeller for the past 6 years and I am currently working in a game design studio using the next-gen Crysis game engine. I hate to sound cocky but I do believe that I know a bit more about this then you do. Your fanatic love of ray-tracing is not justified when it comes to implementing it in games. Granted it creates some beautiful renders but they either use another form of lighting such as ray-traced photon lighting or radiosity, both of which take far to long to realistically use in a game engine. The crysis engine will be introducing some real time radiosity for the first time but as has been stated by crytek in their interviews that will be on a very limited scale and only on DX10 cards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Processing_Unit Definitely a stub article. http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~woop/rpu/rpu.html Definitely lights things up some more. 66MHz, 350 mbyte/sec. My graphics processor clocks in at 560MHz, and has a memory transfer rate probably in the tens of gigabytes per second. And did I mention my graphics processor would probably get beaten like a red-headed stepchild by this thing for real-time ray-tracing renders? Just wait until they start clocking those things faster, until they get some decent memory bandwidth out of it. Specialized instruction sets FTW. Oh, and they're still running a single core processor. And they can get in the tens of frames per second in real-time renders, though I doubt their environments are quite up to par with a modern game. I also doubt that, at 66MHz and 350 mbyte/sec of memory bandwidth, their processor is quite up to par with modern technology... Yet it's already achieved amazing things.
It will be interesting to see what they can achieve when they have decent hardware support behind them. However I cannot see the major graphic card companys devoting too much time to researching these atleast not for the next few years. We already have the game engines that will be used for the next few years. Unreal 3.0 and the crysis engine being the primary two at the moment. It will take a major revolution in the entire concept of game rendering before we see raytracing hardware and software in our computers. Considering that both technologies are completely incompatible with the other we will most likely need to have two different cards in our computers to play games that use the standard rendering of today and the raytracing rendering of the future if indeed that is where the industry moves to next.
It isn't most realistic. There is energetic method that has better results and is even slower. I don't know anything more about that method. LOL. Who cares. It can be 100 hours on PC. If result is better it's better. Getting normal FPS is completely different thing. (You can use wireframe, no textures, shaders anything and you will get 20 000 fps) I don't think that anyone said here that ray-tracing is useful in games at this state of hardware.
Not at this state, at this state it'd probably be like Quake's first alpha version, whatever that was like, which is to say it'd be pretty horrendous compared to what it will become. On the other hand, given time to mature the technology could quite easily kick what we're currently using in the pants. Oh, Darg... I don't think nVidia or ATi (I mean... AMD) would get rid of the old instruction sets, what they'd probably do is just add the new ones on top, or depending on whether or not the architectures are even compatible, they might just have the RPU sit, for all intents and purposes, right next to or inside the GPU itself, separate yet integrated.
On the original topic of that Quadro...I've gotta ask the question - did an uneducated 3 year old write that arcticle? That, to play games? You're kidding, right? 20 CPUs to feed it? Wait, this thing is for WORKSTATIONS....and workstations have how many CPUs? 2? 4 with multiple cores. What type of bandwidth is that? DDR hits around 6.4 in dual channel. 20 CPUs?!?!?! Someone needs to learn before they try to write a frigging article.
Again, no...the writer of that article doesn't know crap. It will likely consume less than 1K watts at 12V DC. Quadro cards aren't much different than GeForce cards.
