Ray Traced Graphics Explored
PCPer has a very interesting article on-line today dealing with Ray Traced graphics. Guest writer Daniel Pohl has created new rendering engines for both Quake 3 and Quake 4 that use ray tracing as the draw method instead of the standard rasterization techniques used in all games today. The Q3 and Q4 engines don't run incredibly fast, but the results show a myriad of benefits including being able to take advantage of more and more processing cores simultaneously.
"The water in "Quake 4: Ray traced" (http://www.q4rt.de/) uses an animation set of many normal maps to simulate the height differences from the waves. One ray is used for reflection on that normal maps, one ray is used to get the refraction through the water. The result is nice looking water."
