4GB RAM in 7th Gen Consoles...

[Plaupius]

Retrasado said:

Plaupius said:

talkingparrot said:
The next gen will probably have ray tracing capabilities. This will require a significant amount of ram and graphical capabilities.

Can somebody please explain to me what does it mean to "have ray tracing capabilities"? I know quite well what ray tracing is, hence the question. And, for one thing, why would we need or want to have "ray tracing capabilities" in a game console? That is, assuming they are something else than being able to produce ray traced renderings, which requires no extra capability of the computer/console whatsoever.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)

At this point, it's impossible to render in real-time because current computers aren't powerful enough. It may be possible in 4-5 years, but I personally doubt the next-gen consoles will have the capability to do it. Maybe the next-next-gen though.

 

As I said, I know what ray tracing is, I spent a good deal of time with Pov-Ray some ten years ago. That's why I posed the question. And yes, it is possible to render real-time raytracing scenes, there have been demos of such systems for years already. The thing is, there's not a whole lot to gain from doing so, because ray tracing is really computational heavy stuff, and to get to real-time performance you have to sacrifice a lot of stuff that makes ray-tracing worthwhile to begin with. So, again, where is the point? Do we really need 99.9% photorealistic reflections, shadows, refractions, diffractions etc? I can think of several other things that should be using the processor cycles instead of ray-tracing in games.