From Slashdot comes another story on ray-tracing. On the Intel Research blog, there is an interesting entry called “Real Time Ray-Tracing in Your Pocket”, talking about ray-tracing as a possibility for rendering graphics for games on mobile gaming platforms. Now this is surprising since we’ve only seen real-time ray-tracing implemented for Quake 3 and Quake 4 with multiple high-end high-powered computing platforms.

It turns out that since the resolution is a lot lower on mobile device screens than PC screen, a lot less rays have to be traced and thus the computing power required is drastically lessened. The example the blog entry gives is that 480×272 resolution would only need 8% the CPU power compared to 1280×720 resolution. On a 1.2 GHz Sony VAIO UX Micro PC, a Quake 4 ray-traced graphics engine was demonstrated to run at 25-45 fps. Of course this is only the graphics engine, and it will still be at least several years for the actual game to be ray-traceable with readily available consumer platforms. But if Moore’s law holds (for at least 10 more years), real-time ray-tracing will probably become the main technology used for game graphics rendering in the future.

(By the way, there are also some interesting comments on Slashdot regarding the story.)