I think TG Daily is being a little short sighted here.

The work this guy is doing is amazing.  I have been playing around with ray tracing and photo-realistic images since POV-Ray 1.0.  During college, I would create a scene and set it rendering before I hit the rack - with the hope that it would be done in the morning.  Now, much more complex scenes can be done in real time.

Anyway, ray tracing, like most physics algorithms, require a massive number of parallel computations to be performed.  This can be done in multi-core CPU's.  It could also be done in the graphics processor.

Both nVida and ATI (AMD) have released programming modules to use their graphics card as general purpose massively parallel calculators.  They are both also looking at how their GPUs can be used for physics calculations.  I think I see some synergy here.  What if you did that ray tracing on the 128 stream processors in a nVidia 8 series graphics cards instead of on a measly 8 CPUs?  If the frames per second truly scale with the number of processors, then it should be no problem.  Plus, look at something like the Cell processor in the PS3.  It already has 8 cores, and the Cell can be scaled quickly to 16 or 32.

With the combination of these two trends, I would say the future of 3D gaming is looking bright.

Posted by: jcallery at 10:43 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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With all of this talk about President Bush and the North American Union (NAU), I think it would be useful to take a look at it from the standpoint of motivations.  Namely, why would a theoretically conservative President want a North American Union?
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Posted by: jcallery at 10:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I guess I was wrong about the Amero.

Posted by: jcallery at 10:11 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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How nerdy are you?

Posted by: jcallery at 07:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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