That's what surprised me most about this article: they crow that it's a CPU-only technology... why?
Because they don't know where raytracing research has gotten to with GPGPUs. Indeed if a few years ago you had told me that GPGPUs would be handling the insanely branching search of raytracing I'd have told you you were mad. Now we have iray. Bottom line: yes, its a staggeringly inefficient algorithm compared to a CPU, but I've got 480 cores!!!
I'll place money that this technique is just raytracing with a nice, hierarchical voxel tree. Plenty of work being/been done on combining such spatial subdivisions with SIMD. Usually the search ends on a polygon with a collision test. The idea here, which I havent come across (but I've not read every paper) is to store the subdivision down to sub-poly level so that you can skip the collision test. I hope they still share surface information between voxels, but maybe not. Essentially there are plenty of researchers who could implement their algorithm right now by adding "return true" for their poly hit test and increasing the subdivision threshold.
As Carmack said 114 days ago, "Nice idea. Be a few years till its viable."
But I'd be surprised if its this team that delivers the goods. They seem woefully uninterested in the wealth of research in the area.
Comments
That's what surprised me most about this article: they crow that it's a CPU-only technology... why?
Because they don't know where raytracing research has gotten to with GPGPUs. Indeed if a few years ago you had told me that GPGPUs would be handling the insanely branching search of raytracing I'd have told you you were mad. Now we have iray. Bottom line: yes, its a staggeringly inefficient algorithm compared to a CPU, but I've got 480 cores!!!
I'll place money that this technique is just raytracing with a nice, hierarchical voxel tree. Plenty of work being/been done on combining such spatial subdivisions with SIMD. Usually the search ends on a polygon with a collision test. The idea here, which I havent come across (but I've not read every paper) is to store the subdivision down to sub-poly level so that you can skip the collision test. I hope they still share surface information between voxels, but maybe not. Essentially there are plenty of researchers who could implement their algorithm right now by adding "return true" for their poly hit test and increasing the subdivision threshold.
As Carmack said 114 days ago, "Nice idea. Be a few years till its viable."
But I'd be surprised if its this team that delivers the goods. They seem woefully uninterested in the wealth of research in the area.