NVIDIA recently announced the world’s first interactive raytracing engine. It has been fairly quiet in the media when it comes to both AMD and NVIDIA looking at raytracing, but behind the curtains there are a lot of things happening. As you perhaps remember from the great Intel and NVIDIA sandbox war of 2008-2009, NVIDIA wants to use the GPU for pretty much anything, no need for a GPU. This is actually also quite true for the GPU guys at AMD, and all other GPU makers, they just keep a lower profile.
At the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference, AMD will be showing a combined rasterization and raytracing hybrid graphics demonstration. We are assuming that is is going to use raytracing for the lights and shadows, while the rest will be raster graphics. We’re eager to see what it will look at and what kind of performance we could expect.
When it comes to raytracing in general, GPUs are well suited, as long as the light doesn’t start bouncing around all too much. Then the parallel architecture might not have the same advantage anymore. Bear in mind, I don’t claim to be an expert here, but based on what industry sources have informed us both AMD and NVIDIA are looking to implement raytracing with its GPUs as soon as it’s possible.
Raytraced picture by CausticRT, a third raytracing company
It’s not to today though, both have tried it and both have experienced very poor performance. NVIDIA tried to do it all on the GPU and got poor performance, AMD mainly tried to do lights and shadows, but still didn’t manage to get any decent performance from it. Based on these failed attempts, both are mainly going to try and implement lights and shadows, and maybe physics, in the near future, but exactly when this will happen is anyone’s educated guess.
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