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IDF 2010: Intel ray-traces Wolfenstein

by Pete Mason on 15 September 2010, 10:53

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaz2z

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It wouldn't be a proper tech-show without someone running a ray-tracing demonstration, and this year's IDF is no different.  Intel was on hand to show Wolfenstein running with the advanced lighting-effects in real-time on a current-gen laptop - almost.

The notebook was actually just used as a thin-client, while the heavy lifting was carried out by a 'cloud' of four Intel servers using the company's Knight Ferry platform.  The add-in boards - which have recently begun shipping to partners - use a ‘Many Integrated Core' (MIC) architecture and share many design and architectural elements with the cancelled Larrabee video-cards.

The Knights Ferry board

Rather than playing games, these boards are designed for the high-performance computing (HPC) market where massively-parallel tasks are common.  Ray-tracing, being an incredibly intensive and highly-parallel exercise, is perfectly suited to show-off the platform by taking advantage of the computational-power on offer.

The demo showed a very detailed chandelier, a well-polished car and a surveillance station where each screen was updated in real time.  All of this was being rendered at a very smooth 40 to 80 frames-per-second by the servers, which was then displayed on a laptop (presumably) over a network connection.  While we aren't quite at ray-tracing on a consumer PC yet, it's still quite an impressive demonstration.

 

 

Obviously this doesn't have much of a practical impact for the average gamer.  However, cloud-based rending-services - like OnLive - are starting to enter the realm of feasibility, and Intel looks like it could be well positioned to provide the servers that will power these systems.

More detail's on the specifics are also available from our man on the ground at IDF.



HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Very nice. Although I wish everyone these days didn't use the word “cloud” for anything that involves more than one server… :rolleyes:
Fraz
Very nice. Although I wish everyone these days didn't use the word “cloud” for anything that involves more than one server… :rolleyes:

That was Intel's word, not mine. :)
Is anyone bored of one poster saying “but will it run Crysis?” yet?

No? OK.
Shooty*;1979816
Is anyone bored of one poster saying “but will it run Crysis?” yet?

No? OK.

Will it run Crysis 2??


:p
Shooty*;1979816
Is anyone bored of one poster saying “but will it run Crysis?” yet?

No? OK.

Will it ray-trace Crysis?

Actually, I'm fairly sure if you hooked up all of the servers and GPUs in the world and then plugged them directly into the Sun, you still couldn't ray-trace Crysis.