Rasterisers texture very quickly because the inner loop is a good match for hardware. Triangles go through the pipeline and wind up on the screen as scanlines, basically two endpoints with some associated attributes (texcoords, vertex colour, etc). Texturing the scanline is just a matter of interpolating those attributes between their two known values, which is very fast. Cache coherency is also good, since two adjacent pixels will be located close in the same texture (mipmapping ensures this).

In comparison when you fire off a ray, the hardware has no idea how that pixel will need to be shaded. 

http://code.google.com/p/quake-gamecube/ 

but that's a large part of raytracing optimisation, making things run in a way that you can use coherency between rays. And, yeah, as long as we don't have gpu like computing power for raytracing... 

Now I ain't much good at the internets, like some of you whizzkids, but does all this technologistic hocus-pocus mean that dem computering games goan be mighty purdy? 

Gameplay'll still suck some dem balls tho. 

"Gameplay'll still suck some dem balls tho."

Well, ray tracing doesn't really affect gameplay unless you're going to argue visibility of enemies in a unified lighting scheme or something. 

Thats cool Spirit!! The screenshot is too dark tho....

Totally ruins everything in my life.... 

but atm raytracing stands no chance for realtime rendering vs "raseterizing", cause the later been advanced by the whole software and hardware industy for the last 10+ years and its not stopping. I think Carmack ok Sweeney, said that, not my words really.

tere is a joke that goes "Ray tracing is the technology of the future and it always will be!"
and in the future we`ll have a nice blend both
but so far there is no reason to get any excited 

It's nice to see research into other areas, that's all. It's not time wasted if something of value is learned - even if that something is that ray tracing isn't currently viable or what-have-you.

Pushing more and more triangles through the pipeline will likely reach a point of diminishing returns. 

being skeptical of the benefits of raytacing. Sweeny seems more interested in the idea as far as I can tell from the interviews I've read.

////WARNING - BUZZ WORDS IN USE UP AHEAD////

There is is an interesting correlation, at least in my mind, between the scalability raytracing offers and what is shown to occur with very high end theoretical languages like Haskell. Haskell is so theoretical versus practical a language that the designers had to apply monadic math theory just to achieve an interface for Input/output.

However, what research is showing these high level languages are performing better
at mega data sets than relatively low level languages like C++. The extra rigorous application of mathematics to their design makes their comparative performance more stable under stress tests. 

is way easier on multicore, as is raytracing. 

That Creature Creator is magic. Pure magic.

LOOOOOOOOOOVE 

I would never object to an honest attempt to advance the field. But this isn't research, this is a commercial for Intel's new hardware. 

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/games/promotions/spore/uk/*http://h.yimg.com/jh/content/p/1/1220360/spore_creature_creator_yahoo617.exe

^^
yahoo has a version of it up 

link 

to our aguirRe.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/17/healthscience/17mund.php 

very fascinating, HeadThump.
Without Hitler and Stalin fucking up Europe, where would we be now? 

So has anyone tried StreamMyGame http://www.streammygame.com ? As bizarre as it sounds and technically unfeasible as it sounds, it actually seems to work from what I've seen from YouTube videos, see one of Crysis here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Vyb0Wg1mthM&NR=1 

when I asked myself if anyone would be interested in that article when I posted it :)

It is altogether possible that if web technology was developed in the 30's that it would have been centralized with limited access for the masses much like the stunted development of television, given most Western nations, including mine, had a strong authoritarian/bureaucratic bent at that time.

Consider the suppression of cable television as a medium. The technology was developed in the same time frame as broadcast, but because the doyens of our FCC believed it would be difficult to control content on cable to the extent they could on the three networks; it wasn't allowed to develop commercially for over thirty years.

We also had a similar stifling of innovation in telecommunications technology and commercial use with the (government granted) AT&T monopoly. It wasn't until the Bells were broken up in the mid eighties that long distance communication became cheap and affordable enough for your average Joe Middle-Class Blow to set up his own servers and for small start ups to build up there own net based servers.

So, it might have not made much difference, but that is just speculation. Without Hitler and Stalin as looming threats, it is also possible and likely that Europe would have developed along different lines, Managerialism (a term used by some political scientist in the 30's) would have lost its allure as a governing principle, and where leading technologist realized that at least in communications decentralization is a good thing. 

Laugh... HeadThump, if you're right about Haskell having similarities to Intel's ray tracing project - just like those functional languages - ray tracing in games will be good for f*** all in the real world.

But Intel shoving the thing down our throats may be another matter. 

on society, science, technology, politics... so much so that speculating on what might have been different seems a bit pointless to me.

OTOH, maybe all the things that came out of it would have happened anyway, and all that changed was the rate things happened. Who knows? :) 

But there is the school of thought that anything that happens in society is a product of it.

Meaning that Hitler and Stalin existed in the first place because there was something fundamentally wrong, which gave rise to the attitudes existing outside and so the control and nanny state culture.

Hindsight is a great thing - back then it almost certainly seemed the way forward. Governments exist to remove autonomous control, but they are necessary.

This same conversation will be had in ten years about technology n. 

I wonder how much demand there is for a site that is:

1) about security and privacy of communications in the digital age
2) with topics ranging from securing data stored locally on a computer, web browsing, email, IM, etc etc
3) is written in plain and easy to understand language
4) explains all the terms in simple language and gives examples of most common threats and how to identify them
5) introduces the reader to the most common solutions and concepts behind preventing privacy and data breaches
6) explaining why they should care in the first place

Any thoughts? 

People will always rip people off. Having said that I dont even know what GPL means, so YEAH! - A site like you describe could be very usefull! :P 

there are plenty of programmers in active studios pissing their pants thinking of what multi-threading will look like on the next series of Play Stations and X-boxes, and how that can be handled in a traditional imperative framework.