Intel hires Quake 4 Ray-Trace guy

A WHILE AGO, we published an article about Ray-Trace projects using Quake 3 and Quake 4 game engines. Daniel Pohl, the boy-genius behind the project, recently completed his degree at Erlangern University, in cooperation with Saarland Uni. Then Daniel went searching for a job in the gaming industry, armed with some interesting ideas supplementing this one.

Pohl's ideas about how physics and collision calculations could be done using rays of light fell on deaf ears in a multitude of companies, but for the biggest one. La Intella hired Daniel to work in Applications Research Lab, exploring the feasibility of Ray-Tracing as a replacement for raster graphics and enabling greater interactivity inside a virtual world.

Does this means that sooner or later, Intel discrete graphics products such as Larrabee and its successors just might kill off Nvidia and AMD, or force a radical change of thinking? It remains to be seen. But one thing is certain, this business is extremely volatile and subject to radical changes overnight. For all we know, Ray-Trace chips could be just around the corner.

Naturally, We wish Daniel all the best in his future job. µ