VizWorld.com

Intel has just released a collection of Code Kernels to do photo-realistic ray-tracing entirely using instruction accelerators (SSE and AVX) on the CPU.

Embree is a collection of high-performance ray tracing kernels, developed at Intel Labs. The kernels are optimized for photo-realistic rendering on the latest Intel® processors with support for the SSE and AVX instruction sets. In addition to the ray tracing kernels, Embree provides an example photo-realistic rendering engine. Embree is designed for Monte Carlo ray tracing algorithms, where the vast majority of rays are incoherent. The specific single-ray traversal kernels in Embree provide the best performance in this scenario and they are very easy to integrate into existing applications.

The results are beautiful I must admit, and a stab against GPU-accelerated raytracers like iRay.  However, they haven’t published any details on the time required for rendering other than to say “a perfect result in about a minute” on one particular model. You can get a few more details in this short video from the creators:

via Embree – Photo-Realistic Ray Tracing Kernels – Intel® Software Network – Intel® Software Network.

Hardware, Science intel, raytracing

Intel has posted an article on using the Cloud to perform ray tracing in games. Normally, I am not a fan of the term Cloud, because of its overuse and hype. However, in this case, I will make an exception because it uses Intel’s Knights Ferry. What is Knight’s Ferry? Remember Larrabee? Larrabee was the codename for a GPGPU chip that Intel was developing, that was canceled. The follow-on project is called Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) project, with the first product being codenamed Knight’s Corner. Knight’s Ferry falls up under the MIC project. The article describes Knight’s Ferry as:

Intel code name Knights Ferry is the first-generation development platform for the Intel MIC Architecture. It includes a PCIe card that has a 32-core chip on it that is clocked at 1.2 GHz. The development platform is programmable with the regular tools and programming languages that developers regularly use. A bit further out there are plans for an Intel MIC Architecture-based product, code named Knights Corner, that will use 22nm manufacturing technology and will therefore be able to even have more than 50 cores on the chip.

The researchers used four server machines, each with a Knights Ferry PCIe card (32 cores, 4 threads per core). Each server also had a i7-980X processor, which has 6 cores running at 3.33 GHz. The thin client was a a small laptop, running on a Core2 Duo processor P9600 and with a 1280×800 screen.

Everything was connected over a Gigabit Ethernet LAN. Now, not everybody has Gigabit Ethernet, but this is a proof of concept, not a finished product. I suspect that Gigabit Ethernet is not necessary anyway. Sure, it gives you a lot of bandwidth, but from my own testing of remote visualization services cloud-based applications, it is the latency that is most important. If you are getting a 100 ms ping, then that means you can only get 10 frames per second, at best. You really need a connection with less than 33 ms ping time to get 30 frames per second, and it would be best if it was even lower.

Now if all of this sounds familiar, it is because we covered it last year in Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced, On a Laptop. At the time, we did not know that they were using Knight’s Ferry. From the conclusion to the article:

Over the last sections it has been shown that ray tracing can offer a variety of new and interesting effects to games. Through this research using a cloud-based gaming setup with machines that utilize the Intel code name Knights Ferry development platform, ray-traced games with a high frame rate can already be achieved today.

Further progress could be made by optimizing the video codec used in order to be able to use it for even smaller devices such as netbooks and tablets. Instead of assuming a Gigabit Ethernet setup, optimizations for wireless networks could be investigated to bring the technology to handheld devices like smartphones. In order to cut down on the number of servers needed, it should be possible to develop support for using multiple Knights Ferry PCIe cards within a single machine. To increase image quality, several well-known post-processing techniques like HDR bloom and depth of field could be added. A smart solution on how to do anti-aliasing for ray tracing with high performance on the Knights Ferry platform could also be investigated.

via : Experimental Cloud-based Ray Tracing Using Intel® MIC Architecture for Highly Parallel Visual Processing

Hardware cloud, intel, knights ferry, larrabee, raytrace, raytracer, raytracing

GPU Ray-tracers, start your engines.. NVidia has just officially released the OptiX CUDA-based Real-Time Interactive Ray Tracer on their website, free.  Announced back at SIGGRAPH, there have been numerous demonstrations on various conferences and venues, but now you can try it for yourself.

Jeff Brown, NVIDIA’s GM for Professional Solutions, explains why OptiX is invaluable: “This opens the door to a new level of interactive realism. Ray tracing’s inherent parallelism makes it a perfect fit for GPU computing. The OptiX engine makes it easy for developers to exploit that power to create an exciting new class of applications. It enables critical design tasks — such as examining reflections, refractions and shadow – to be performed now in real-time.”

Of course, they claim it’s the “World’s First”, but I think the guys at Caustic, Intel‘s Larrabee , and Fryrender would argue that claim.

Go download it in the NVidia Developer’s Zone.

via nTersect Blog – NVIDIA.

Science cuda, gpgpu, library, nvidia, optix, raytracing, software

Caustic, makers of the revolutionary CausticRT & CausticOne systems for hardware accelerated ray-tracing, have released a new demonstration video showing the system at work within Autodesk’s 3ds Max with Brazil.

This is our latest interactive demo of “true” global illumination using the CausticRT platform with Brazil in 3dsMax.  Its a fully ray traced interior living room scene with 2,080,957 polygons, and outdoor and indoor lighting that includes classic 3D geometry such as the Stanford Dragon & Bunny.  The poly count for each of the objects are as follows:

• Bunny: 70K polygons
• Dragon: 800K polygons
• Buddha: 1M polygons
• Interior: 22K polygons

The 3dsMax ActiveShade window resolutions are: 400×300 & 800×600

It’s a powerful demo that really shows how companies are embracing the technology, and some of the fantastic features it enables for users.  See the full announcement, with more details, and the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware 3dsmax, autodesk, brazil, caustic, raytracing

Right on the heels of the NVidia OptiX announcement, a new tutorial from the Alexandra Institute shows how to build your own CUDA accelerated ray-tracing system.

This little tutorial will not state that the GPU thing is the only way to go or try to preach something. But it will hopefully help you to get started using CUDA to accelerate ray tracing. I have been writing a lot of shaders for other applications so it was very natural for me to experiment with a GPU implementation. So the natural choice would be to use Nvidia’s CG or glsl. But i decided to try Cuda, because i wanted to learn what kind of beast it is and second it should be easier to code.

via Triers CUDA ray tracing tutorial « Computer Graphics – Alexandra Institute.

Science cuda, raytracing, tutorial

A new product offering from NVidia boasts to be the first interactive ray-tracing engine.  The claim is a bit overblown for PR reasons, but interesting nonetheless.

The NVIDIA SceniX scene management engine provides the interactive core for demanding real-time, professional 3D graphics applications. Whether used in leading products such as RTT DeltaGen, Autodesk Showcase and Anark Media Studio, or in scores of in-house tools used for advanced visualization, simulation, broadcast graphics, medical imagery, and energy exploration, developers look to the SceniX engine for the interactive framework to manage 3D data and convey results in real-time at high fidelity.

Read the full press release after the break.

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Graphics, Science nvidia, raytracing, siggraph

A new video from Intel is online at YouTube, where Intel Research Scientist Daniel Pohl shows an update on their “Realtime Ray Tracing” project.

With the power of upcoming many-core architectures Intel is developing, real-time ray tracing (using the physics of light to realistically render an interactive 3D scene) comes closer and closer to the desktop. At Research@Intel Day 2009, Intel researchers showcased the latest innovations from our Real-time Ray Tracing project, including more realistic 3D water and the ability to render more than 500 animated characters at once, and showed a version rendering multiple camera views on a stereoscopic display, in which viewers can see the 3D depth of the scene without the need for special glasses. See video from Research@Intel Day 2009 for more info.

Now, the video is pretty neat.  The 8-layer stereoscopic display alone is pretty impressive.  But I fail to see what, if anything, in this demonstration is Ray-Tracing.  The water looks like classic tesselated surfaces, and so does the environment.  Maybe someone in the PR group got confused and used the wrong buzzword?  Or maybe it’s just a bad demonstration of the technology.  See the video after the break, and tell us what you think.

via Intel Press Room

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Hardware intel, raytracing, video

I just got off the phone with the crew at Caustic Graphics, makers of the amazing real-time raytracing card the CausticOne.  See that graphic above?  They’ve got some big announcements coming up at SIGGRAPH that fit in those big black boxes, but if you want to know what it is then you’ll have to wait until Monday at 8am (Eastern)!  Caustic Graphics will be at SIGGRAPH in booth #2026 demonstrating their CausticRT and CausticOne systems, as well as participating in a few other mysterious locations that we’ll announce on Monday!

In addition, Caustic will be presenting at the High-Performance Graphics conference August 1-3 in New Orleans, one of the co-located events with SIGGRAPH, to discuss their technology and talk about making CausticGL an open-standard, like OpenGL and OpenCL, for ray-tracing graphics.

Hardware caustic, raytracing, siggraph

John West found some news that a japanese company “Tops Systems Corp” has partnered with Toyota Motors and Nihon Unisys to build a dedicated ray-tracing IC that sounds very similar to the previously announced Caustic offerings.

Tops Systems Corp of Japan, a venture involved in multicore technology, together with Toyota Motor Corp and Nihon Unisys Ltd, both of Japan, is developing a dedicated integrated circuit (IC) for ray tracing*, an image rendering method used in 3D computer graphics (3D CG) processing. A total of 73 heterogeneous cores designed specifically for ray tracing operations will be single-chipped, and nine of these chips interconnected (see Fig). With high-definition (HD) resolution at 1920 x 1080 pixels, the target processing speed is 800 tera floating point operations per second (TFLOPS).

A commenter is careful to spell out a few more details:

It’s actually the total system performance that is aiming to be 800 TFLOPS (presumably sufficient to meet their visualisation/performance requirements).

Each on of the nine dedicated devices, is specified to produce 88 TFLOPS and each is comprised of numerous cooperating clusters of very specialised cores (with limited amounts of local memory). Think of this as the ray-tracing equivalent of the MD-GRAPE machines!

Has the age of real-time Ray Tracing finally come?

800TFLOPS Multicore IC for Realtime RayTracing via insideHPC.com.

Hardware caustic, ic, raytracing, tops

James McCombe is taking advantage of the buzz around E3 to talk about the Caustic Graphics raytracing solution.  The folks at InfoWorld sit down with him and talk about where the technology and market it heading.  While the tone of his responses is a bit condescending, he makes some good points.

We have this small little thing called the 3D professional market, which already places a tremendously high value on ray tracing and is willing to pay for it. And out solution right now without being integrated into a stream processor [or] a separate chip, is it’s still able to provide tremendous orders of magnitude speed gain to that market, and they’re willing to pay for that.

I would say the “3D Professional Market” is a bit more than a “small little thing”.  I’m pretty sure the interview also has a typo in it, otherwise he completely dismisses the possibility of seeing the Caustic chipset in gaming consoles right before saying it would be trivial.

McCombe: We see no reason this would be in a game console eventually, it’s just a matter of silicon integration with existing screen processors.

James McCombe on ray tracing & the gaming industry | Games – InfoWorld.

Hardware caustic, e3, interview, raytracing