Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!apple!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!uupsi!sunic!news.funet.fi!tukki.jyu.fi!ap
From: ap@tukki.jyu.fi (Patric Aalto)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Realtime Raytracing demo on a PC... Anybody wanna see?
Keywords: Raytracing, Shading, Realtime
Message-ID: <1991Jan11.080920.992@tukki.jyu.fi>
Date: 11 Jan 91 08:09:20 GMT
References: <1991Jan8.072628.13689@tukki.jyu.fi> <61606@masscomp.ccur.com>
Organization: University of Jyvaskyla, Finland
Lines: 33

In article <61606@masscomp.ccur.com> mark@calvin.westford.ccur.com (Mark Thompson) writes:
>In article <1991Jan8.072628.13689@tukki.jyu.fi> ap@tukki.jyu.fi (Patric Aalto) writes:
>>I just finished a small demo I have been working on a couple of months.
>>It performs real-time ray-tracing and shading (a sort of mixture of them
>>both) on an IBM PC-compatible computer with VGA graphics. I find it pretty
>>impressive (although the environment is pretty simple: It has a planet,
>>a moon and a sun). It runs at 70 frames/second on my 80386/20 Mhz machine.
>
>Yeah right....and pigs can fly. 

:-)

>It takes an AT&T pixel machine (which
>cranks out more MFLOPS than a roomful of 80386/20 Mhz machines) about
>3 seconds to ray-trace a simple image.

Yes, I know.. And it takes many hours to raytrace a simple image using
QRT on a 80386/20 Mhz machine without math processor. Using the conventional
approach, that is (normalized real (double) -type vectors etc).

>Sounds to me like you are doing
>some SERIOUS cheating.

Sure. Or well.. Depends on what you mean with cheating? My demo does not
use the conventional approach to this problem, so feel free to say that
it DOES NOT do raytracing. The results LOOK LIKE raytracing though, so
what's the difference?-) I'm not cheating anything else than the computer
to do something it should not be able to do. Try out this demo and then say
what you think.

Patrick Aalto
ap@tukki.jyu.fi
tkp72@jytko.jyu.fi