Posted on Friday, August 29 2008 @ 5:42 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
One of the topics that popped up at NVIDIA's visual computing event NVISION was ray tracing. Bit Tech
heard from NVIDIA that even the movie industry doesn't fully use ray tracing yet as it's much too intensive, indicating that you shouldn't expect games that use ray tracing to a large extend anytime soon.
During a conversation I had earlier, things got even more interesting because according to Nvidia’s representatives, even the movie industry is using ray tracing sparingly – and it’s not as if frames have to be rendered in real-time for an animated motion picture.
Cars is one of the few movies to make extensive use of ray tracing and the technology used in most of Pixar’s films is provided by mental images – a wholly owned subsidiary of Nvidia.
Most of the animated motion picture industry is still very focused on rasterisation and that’s also the case in the real-time 3D graphics industry as well. Back when we interviewed David Kirk, he said a similar thing and the latest discussion I’ve had goes further to show that there’s no reason to believe ray tracing will magically displace rasterisation.
