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I have been goofing off with povray over my holidays,

I got to thinking when realtime raytracing will be a feasible render method for games.
I was imagining the quality of the renders while maintaining 60+ fps.

MY question is when do you think it will be feasible. ? 3 / 5 / 7 years or longer and why do you think so, not just a number guess

I know raytracing has many pixel and texels to calculate as well as multiple passes.
It would be cool just to see the start of it in my life time

maybe graphics cards later on will have special implimentation of a raytracing cut down environment perhaps.

I know there was raycast games etc but

I understand todays graphic cards display realtime or very close it on some machines
but what are your ideas about omg realtime raytacing like povray.?

Raytrace Rendering is possible right now... the question is thew degree and how you wish to use it.
Technically speaking there was a dude from Muddy Foot that created a software Raytracer that was designed to run on the same system Staropia was (as some side project i think) and while it was only at something like 320x240 it still ran at a respectable 35fps, running Frogger I think.

If you use Shaders, you can really ramp up the speed. Have the example of the Shader in a 150,000 polygon environment running 20 reflective surfaces and 100 shadow volumetrics at 140fps on a 6800 Ultra

If you think about it Volumetrics was born from the Raytrace Renderers, and are now running real-time in games like Doom3. Global Illumination is now possible with Sphere Harmonics that take ages to render, but once done they can use a simple Dot3 (similar to Normal Textures) providing Normal Shading.

R.O.S.E. Online that MMORPG someone recently was posting about, uses that.. one of the first games I've seen to, and the environments look gorgeous.

What's more interesting is that most cards will use raytracers suchas Mental Ray @ 640x480@60Hz Rendering .. w/o AntiAliasing will render on my Duron 800 MHz at around 2fps, on my AthlonXP 2600+ 15fps. With those Raytracers it really is a case of the CPU speed, rather than graphics card.. Shaders are one *hell* of alot faster at it

the problem is that the current hardware isn't designed for raytracing, its designed for rendering polygons. I we got some dedicated hardware for it, it could be a possibility

it would probably work really well on som kind of parallel processor system, because raytracing is the kind of rendering process that can easily be shared

Mmmm, Realtime high detail raytracing woul be so sweeeeet