Patrick Elliott wrote:
>With the number of component we could fit into a new card
>the result would be no bigger than an existing NVidia card, however the
>development time needed to produce the chip, make sure it was stable and
>then pray that game companies that are used to using the cheats supplied
>through OpenGL and DirectX will actually use it makes the odds of anyone
>seeing such a card on the market any time soon very unlikely.

Cheats? Was there ever a 30fps algorithm free of them? :-)

>The irony being that in many cases you have to upload large chunks of
>additional geometry and pre-made textures every few seconds in a game,
>while a true raytrace engine would only have to upload terrain geometry
>and those textures you couldn't produce using procedural systems (which for
>most games would be maybe 10% of them...)

Why won't a raytracing card have to load new geometry regularly? It's not
necessarily going to know ahead of time which objects will be needed during
a game, and they are not all going to fit in memory at the same time for a
modern game.

Procedural textures will have to be calculated by the graphics card, which
surely has enough to do already (if you get the CPU to do it and send it to
the graphics card, you might as well send an image). I thought anyway that
procedural textures are not specific to raytracing?

Whilst I'm sure that, given sufficient time, you could reproduce 90% (or
100%) of game image textures with procedural textures, the question surely
is whether it is worth the extra time taken to generate the textures in the
first place, every frame. I can especially see problems producing things
like text at speed.

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