harrison partch

A manycore mill could run the raytracing code I have been working on; a GPU cannot. If it could it would be a CPU and not a GPU, since the algorithm traces pointers in main memory along each ray. This movie was traced on [CPU~Quad core Intel Core i7-2700K CPU (-HT-MCP-) clocked at Min:1832.578Mhz Max:2702.656Mhz]:

The postprocessing sped the video by 2.5 times, but the frame times of every tenth frame (in ms) are visible in the corner. This is within an order of magnitude of acceptable fullscreen realtime performance; at that point (cpu) tracing wins over (gpu) rasterization. The tracer parallelizes almost perfectly across cores, so one wants as many of them as possible; since each ray follows pointers, cache misses are (probably) more important than other exection time, so more slower cores would be better than fewer faster cores. The code is open source and on github.

This is the first footage ever from the original tracer and dates to 2004 or 2005:

• This reply was modified 10 years, 10 months ago by  harrison partch.

Is a cap machine compatible with Oberon?

[F]or game-type horsepower you want a GPU handling the triangles.

Not for long. CPU tracing will soon beat GPU rasterization.

Carmack is wrong. Tracing triangles on the GPU is not the way forward.