Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced, On a Laptop!

Wow, can one laptop handle all of that rendering? Of course not! Intel has this thing streaming from 4 servers each with about 50 cores. Yeah, this rendering method known as ray tracing requires a lot of power.

Have you heard of ray tracing before? What about Intel’s Larrabee? We’ll if you have been out of the loop on the future of gaming rendering let’s fill you in without going into too much detail. Basically, almost every game on the market is rendered using a method known as rasterization. However, rasterization doesn’t provide the effect quality that raytracing does in a rendered scene. What about modern GPUs? Surely they are fast enough? Well, realistically speaking more of a hybrid approach could be available in the not too distant future, but a fully ray traced scene will most likely out of reach for a bit.

What hardware can currently handle a fully raytraced scene? Just look at the hardware Intel used above. In addition, ray tracing is actually older than rasterization, but as I mention before it has the upper hand in visual effects. If you want to learn more about ray tracying and rasterization I stumbled upon an interesting article that outline the discussion in more detail. Furthermore, Intel was developing a specific GPU that was designed to handle rasterization and ray tracing, but it fell apart. However, Daniel Pohl, they guy behind the other intel ray tracing demos at intel is back at the helm to show us Wolfenstein with ray tracing.

Note: Ray tracing deals with lighting, shadows, reflections, etc. So, keep in mind that you should be focusing on those effects when viewing the video.