phyzik
09-14-2010, 09:08 AM
Wolfenstein gets ray traced - on your laptop!
http://blogs.intel.com/research/2010/09/wolfenstein_gets_ray_traced_-.php
It’s this time of the year again: IDF! Time to show off the cool stuff our graphics research group has been working on. Today at the exhibition I demonstrated our new project called “Wolfenstein*: Ray Traced”.
1) The visual content of the demo. The up-to-date Wolfenstein game is rendered through a real-time ray tracer with several special effects that haven’t been possible before in games with such an accuracy. Two of several highlights are:
•The chandelier model.
http://blogs.intel.com/research/assets_c/2010/09/wolf_chandelier-new-thumb-500x278.jpg
Through ray tracing we are calculating physically correct reflections and refractions in the many glass objects it contains. The model is highly detailed with around one million triangles. This one model consists of three times the detail than everything else in the level combined. Have you ever seen something similar in a current game? Probably not, as with the traditional rendering approach it would not be efficiently doable.
•The surveillance station.
http://blogs.intel.com/research/assets_c/2010/09/wolf_station-thumb-500x278.jpg
At a wall in the game you see twelve screens that each show a different location of the level. This can be used by the player to get a tactical gaming advantage. Have you ever seen something similiar in a current game? Again - probably not.]
2) The method how the demo runs.
The images are rendered from a “cloud” of four servers with Intel’s Knights Ferry platform inside. You might have read ( http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2010/20100531comp.htm ) about this hardware before. It is a Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture targeted towards the High-Performance Computing market (meaning: not targeted to the individual gamer to be bought). As ray tracing is a highly parallel application it can therefore take very good benefit of the many cores that are in a single chip on the Knights Ferry board. Once a chip in one of the servers has finished calculating a new frame for the game it will send it over the network to a thin client, in this case a small laptop.
XVZDH15TRro
Rendering high-end graphics for applications such as gaming in the cloud is an emerging trend that has some interesting advantages. Rather than being constrained to running these high-end applications only on your desktop at home, you can in principal play on any computer - such as a system at your friend’s house or even lightweight systems like a netbook or tablet. In the future, it could also free up compute resources on your system to be used for voice and gesture recognition, increasing the level of immersion for the application.
More screenshots are available at http://www.wolfrt.de .
http://blogs.intel.com/research/2010/09/wolfenstein_gets_ray_traced_-.php
It’s this time of the year again: IDF! Time to show off the cool stuff our graphics research group has been working on. Today at the exhibition I demonstrated our new project called “Wolfenstein*: Ray Traced”.
1) The visual content of the demo. The up-to-date Wolfenstein game is rendered through a real-time ray tracer with several special effects that haven’t been possible before in games with such an accuracy. Two of several highlights are:
•The chandelier model.
http://blogs.intel.com/research/assets_c/2010/09/wolf_chandelier-new-thumb-500x278.jpg
Through ray tracing we are calculating physically correct reflections and refractions in the many glass objects it contains. The model is highly detailed with around one million triangles. This one model consists of three times the detail than everything else in the level combined. Have you ever seen something similar in a current game? Probably not, as with the traditional rendering approach it would not be efficiently doable.
•The surveillance station.
http://blogs.intel.com/research/assets_c/2010/09/wolf_station-thumb-500x278.jpg
At a wall in the game you see twelve screens that each show a different location of the level. This can be used by the player to get a tactical gaming advantage. Have you ever seen something similiar in a current game? Again - probably not.]
2) The method how the demo runs.
The images are rendered from a “cloud” of four servers with Intel’s Knights Ferry platform inside. You might have read ( http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2010/20100531comp.htm ) about this hardware before. It is a Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture targeted towards the High-Performance Computing market (meaning: not targeted to the individual gamer to be bought). As ray tracing is a highly parallel application it can therefore take very good benefit of the many cores that are in a single chip on the Knights Ferry board. Once a chip in one of the servers has finished calculating a new frame for the game it will send it over the network to a thin client, in this case a small laptop.
XVZDH15TRro
Rendering high-end graphics for applications such as gaming in the cloud is an emerging trend that has some interesting advantages. Rather than being constrained to running these high-end applications only on your desktop at home, you can in principal play on any computer - such as a system at your friend’s house or even lightweight systems like a netbook or tablet. In the future, it could also free up compute resources on your system to be used for voice and gesture recognition, increasing the level of immersion for the application.
More screenshots are available at http://www.wolfrt.de .