Quake 4 gets ray traced

IF YOU HAVE not been aware of ray-tracing efforts in the world of gaming, then you probably have not heard of a young chap named Daniel Pohl. The boy-wonder from Germany stunned the world couple of years ago, with its Quake 3: Ray-Trace project.

Ray-tracing is a method of modeling and rendering the path of the light as it interacts with the models in a 3D scene. Overall, results in Daniel's projects show extremly good levels of shadows, enabling life-like immersion into the 3D scene.

In what has to be the most innovative pitch for a job audition (target: game developer), Daniel wants to put his stamp of the world of 3D gaming by implementing ray-tracing into 3D games.

After a team from Saarland University developed OpenRT public library, Daniel combined the library with an easily-modified engine and that resulted in Quake 3: RT. And now, the Quake 4: Ray Trace project.

Quake 4 Ray-Trace in action

While the performance may be sluggish on slower machines, many overclocked AMD QuadFather-FX-4x4 and overclocked Kentsfield gamers would happily enjoy slower performance in exhange for ray-tracing done in real time.

Although it's a long-shot, we have to admit that after seeing videos of Quake 3: RT and Quake 4: RT, it seems to us that the 3D industry is going in the wrong direction, at least as far shadows are concerned. If a GPU acceleration of ray-trace develops - which is in line with current GPGPU efforts, - we could see whole new level of gaming realsim. µ

L'INQS
Daniel's article
Project's web-site