On Monday 17 November 2003 23:19, Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 09:28:01PM -0200, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> > [OpenGL vs REYES paper]
> I read this quickly a while ago... wasn't one of the conclusions that
> there were inherent inefficiencies in the Reyes model in the context
> of a hardware implementation?

That is certainly one possible conclusion. But another way to looking at 
it is that the vast gap of a few years ago is now only a more or less 
large one. So we might extrapolate and consider that it is only a 
matter of time before REYES starts invading OpenGL's turf.

> > [and slides]
> I haven't seen this... I'll check it out.

It is the same thing, but with more pictures and less words :-)

> One thing about ray-tracing is that it inherently has bad memory
> locality (for each pixel, you might have to test for intersection
> against each object in your scene).  I don't see a way around this.

Since you mentioned Pat Hanrahan, you might find this paper from his 
fall course's (CS448) reading list interesting:

http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/Publications/2002/Schmittler-AHardwareArchitectureForRayTracing.pdf

> I don't know if real-time ray-tracing/radiosity are desirable from
> the point of view of amount of computation required. 

The question is: do they make prettier pictures?

> This is
> especially true in the common case of mostly static scenes where
> radiosity can be precomputed and stored in textures.  It's my
> understanding that many current 1st person shooters use this
> approach.

To be at least a little on topic, here, our focus should be on Croquet. 
In that context precomputation conflicts with late binding.

But where such tricks can be used, then I am all for them.

> I'm always interested in hearing new ideas.  (I'm very excited that I
> get to hear a talk on the topic by Pat Hanrahan this Thursday).

Enjoy!

-- Jecel