Hello everyone, I saw that article on the net and couldn't find any other thread talking about it either in the gaming or PC forum so I decided to creae this thread to see what people think of the possibility of having a Raytracing GPU in next gen consoles.

Also, from those that know more than me about how the creation of 3D assets for current and raytracing methods differ I wonder how it would affect costs. Would the same scene be more expensive to create with raytracing in mind or possibly less or would the scene construction be the same and thus the cost be the same but just the rendering method being different would give us better results.

Also good to read is the article linked by Stranne as the shortcomings of raytracing in real-time rendering:

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/94

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Sorry, some links for you:

http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/94

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=44850

raytracing is the best way to get realistic lighting and shadowing as it simulates light, but this is way too taxing on the GPU to be done at all in real time, that's why it's just left for pre-rendered video.

perhaps some time in the future when GPU's are powerful enough and designed to handle raytracing in real time can it be used for games, but that future is a long way away.

You know the cell can ray trace.

^^ and so can the C64...

 It took 3 PS3's networked to gether to muster the power to render just 1 car using raytracing in real time, which is a feat of it's own, but to render a full scene like in games would require much more than just 3 PS3's.

Yes but he said if raytracing would be implemented for nexgen consoles. The ps3 has raytracing so it is utilizing it.

RealTime raytracing exists and (because it is such an implicitly parallel problem) can really take advantage of dedicated hardware ... The problem is that conventional realtime 3D graphics tend to look far more realistic because of how computationally expensive raytracing is.

 currently nothing is using raytracing for games.

The PS3 did it but like I said it was 3 PS3 networked together and it was only rending a car and nothing else.

I'm sure that eventually some developer would try to do some form of premitive raytacing on the PS3 but their will of course be other methods that will achive almost exact results but will be less demanding.

@ stranne

Good links.

@ leo-j

Teh c3ll is awesome, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Realtime raytracing in games is a distant future. Also, the earliest examples will likely be underwhelming to those who don't appreciate the technology for what it is.