HappySqurriel on 11 March 2007
Just an interesting site: http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~woop/rpu/rpu.html
The RPU is a fully programmable ray tracing hardware architecture, with support for programmable material, geometry and lighting. The RPU combines the efficiency of GPUs with the advantages of ray tracing. The instruction set of the RPU is GPU like, which is optimal for shading purposes. In addition the RPU supports fast ray traversal through an k-D tree using a dedicated hardware unit and recursive function calls, usefull for recursive ray tracing. To increase efficiency always 4 rays are handled in a packet and multi-threading allows for high utilization of the hardware units.
A working prototype of this hardware architecture has been developed based on FPGA technology. The ray tracing performance of the FPGA prototype running at 66 MHz is comparable to the OpenRT ray tracing performance of a Pentium 4 clocked at 2.6 GHz, despite the available memory bandwith to our RPU prototype is only about 350 MB/s. These numbers show the efficiency of the design, and one might estimate the performance degrees reachable with todays high end ASIC technology. High end graphics cards from NVIDIA provide 23 times more programmable floating point performance and 100 times more memory bandwidth as our prototype. The prototype can be parallelized to several FPGAs, each holding a copy of the scene. A setup with two FPGAs delivering twice the performance of a single FPGA is running in our lab. Scalability to up to 4 FPGA has been tested.
This was written in June of 2005 so (hypothetically speaking) you should be able to get at least 50 times the floating point performance and 200 times the memory bandwith ... If you look at the video they're showing and imagine what 50 to 100 times as much power would do (assuming they used multiple RPUs) it becomes clear that Quake 3 is the tip of the iceburg of what could be done with dedicated hardware ...
