PCPer has a very interesting article on-line today dealing with Ray Traced graphics. Guest writer Daniel Pohl has created new rendering engines for both Quake 3 and Quake 4 that use ray tracing as the draw method instead of the standard rasterization techniques used in all games today. The Q3 and Q4 engines don't run incredibly fast, but the results show a myriad of benefits including being able to take advantage of more and more processing cores simultaneously.
"The water in "Quake 4: Ray traced" (http://www.q4rt.de/) uses an animation set of many normal maps to simulate the height differences from the waves. One ray is used for reflection on that normal maps, one ray is used to get the refraction through the water. The result is nice looking water."
Marco Chiappetta
Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com
