Intel Shows Off Server-Driven Game Ray Tracing

For many years, some companies – namely Intel – have been promoting the idea of using ray tracing techniques in our games. At the same time, there are few gamers opposed to the idea, since the effect could result in increased graphical detail, thanks in part to more realistic shadows, reflections, refractions, ambient occlusion and even some less noticeable details like chromatic aberration.

The problem, of course, is that ray tracing is far more intensive than the rasterization rendering we use for our games today. There’s no small difference, either, and as seen in many ray tracing demos of years past, rasterization for gaming can be 100x faster, or more. Ray tracing looks better, but even the best PCs out there are useless where gaming is concerned. Unless you wanted to game at 320×240, perhaps.

Intel’s not about to let that fact bother it too much, though, as it’s been  ardently working on solutions, and though we’re still in the earlier stages of seeing something people are actually going to use gaming-wise, the company showed off a rather interesting demo this past weekend.

The company demonstrated what was possible if you shared some of the workload with the cloud, and to do so, it used four servers equipped with one “Knight’s Ferry” add-in cards each. Though Intel doesn’t call these graphics cards, they essentially are. At the “core”, there are 32 cores clocked at 1.2GHz each, and a total capacity of 128 threads per card.

Routed to a notebook, these servers worked to deliver Wolfenstein at 1280×720 with ray tracing enabled, at a staggering 40-50 FPS (I am being a little sarcastic with the “staggering”). The results are admittedly neat to look at, and it’s clear that ray tracing can make a vast improvement in many different ways. But, given that it required four servers to deliver the game at a low resolution, it seems like we’re still quite a ways off from seeing this kind of effect in our own PCs.

That’s not to say that movie studios or designers couldn’t harness this kind of power now though. It’d be fantastic for them to be able to preview a scene that utilizes ray tracing without it running at 1 or 2 FPS, and as a result, productivity could sky rocket.

It’s an interesting concept, but what’s even more interesting is to see a graphics card with “Intel” on the side.

Yesterday Intel demonstrated a new example of raytraced graphics on the desktop using a raytrace rendered version of Wolfstein. This time, it was based around a cloud-centric model where frames are rendered on 4 servers, each with a 32-core codename Knight’s Ferry silicon at the core. Knight’s Ferry is a Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture part intel showed off at the International Supercomputer Conference this year with 32 logical cores.