1. Immediate lighting rasterizer = O(S*N*L)
2. Deferred lighting rasterizter =O(S*N)+O(S*L)
3. Ray tracer = O(S*log N*L*D)
where N is the number of solid 3D elements, L is the number of direct illumination lights, D is the indirect lighting depth and S is the number of screen elements.
No matter how I look at this, ray tracing is not very compelling.
Once upon a time, we thought ray tracers were fast. If we hold screen size as a constant and set the number of bounces to 1 for a fair comparison to a 1992 era rasterizer we get the "classic" complexity analysis comparison.
1. Rasterizer = O(N*L)
2. Ray tracer = O(log N*L)
Winner: ray tracer. However, a few things have changed since 1992. First, screen size is important and should not be ignored. This is due to the increasing importance of screen space effects. Second, deferred lighting broke rasterization in half. Third, rasterizers can now do convincing shadows and fake global illumination. So, to keep up with the quality of the average 2010 rasterizer we have to set D>1. This is a 1-2-3 knockout combo for ray tracers.
Rasterizers are the current complexity king. Now, I'll tell you why it will remain the king. Ray tracers have an architecturally bad design. It looks like this:
for p in rays:
for i in items: raytest
for s in lights:
for t in bounces:
There is a beautiful elegance to this. It is a good way to learn how to do computer graphics. Unfortunately, this kind of architecture always leads to bad complexity that looks like this: O(f1*f2*f3*f4
Rasterizers have a better basic architecture. Scatter-gather type architecture tends to lead to nice complexity like this: O(f1)+O(f2)+O(f3)+O(f4). Don't take my word for it, look at the history. The O(N*L) immediate rasterizer got broken up into the O(N)+O(L) deferred rasterizer as soon as enough memory became available. Indirect lighting followed the same pattern.
I'm not saying that ray tracers will always be slow. But, I _am_ saying that if ray tracers ever become fast again, it will be because they have been architecturally restructured into something that looks a lot like a rasterizer. In such a case, any claimed victory by the ray tracer would be a pyrrhic one.
Game publishers are going to be all over this technology if they can make it work because it means the game source code never has to be released and, implemented correctly, the games will be impossible to crack. I'm not too happy about it, but it's the future. If not now, probably this decade or early next.
+1 Insightful. This is what MAFIAADRMFAGS want. And as persistent they are and with as much pull in the industry as they have, they will get it. They say we have purchasing power with the dollar to sway the market. But IMO, wallet power does not compare to litigation or lobbyist power, and hence WE. ARE. FUCKED.
OnLive is the next generation of Steam. It provides useful functionality (hardware independence and session state) on top of the base game itself so some people will prefer it over the alternative. OnLive means that the game will not be published. It will remain a private document stored on a server. There is nothing to make a copy of, since the game itself will never actually be published. Since nothing has been published, the entire issue of "is piracy allowed or disallowed" is meaningless.
Your claim of being harmed or diminished in some way because you cannot pirate the game is ridiculous. Piracy is tolerated in some social circles because copyright infringement doesn't actually harm anybody in a digital economy, but don't mistake tolerance for entitlement. We, as a society, do not entitle people with the right to make copies of private documents. OnLive is quite clever, because games will effectively be protected by the 4th Amendment. No copyright laws needed.
I see this as a very positive direction for a digital society. This approach allows someone to publish a document in two pieces. The first part is a private document which is protected by privacy laws. The second part is a public document which is useless on its own, but becomes valuable when connected to the private document by a network protocol. If this becomes an effective way for creators to earn a living, then we can get rid of the self-destructive, contradictory, unfair, and unenforceable copyright laws.
Explain how stock trading liquidity is a benefit in and of itself
The higher the liquidity, the lower the bid-ask spread. Illiquid assets have gigantic spreads, to the tune of tens of percentage points on their actual value.
... his plan avoids the stepping stone God dropped in fron of us just because we've stepped there before
... did the polynesian's discover Hawaii without exploring neighboring Polynesian islands? Did the Europeans venture to the New World without exploring the Mediterranean?
It's a sad day for Slashdot that this garbage got modded up.
The moon is not a stepping stone. The moon is a gravity well. You don't go down a gravity well. You stay away from it as much as possible. The correct analogy would be: did the polynesian's discover Hawaii without exploring the Mariana Trench? Did the Europeans venture to the New World without exploring the Laurentian Abyss?
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one. -- Phil White