Mirror-finish surfaces are the new edge lighting is the new lighting bloom is the new colored lighting is the new lens flare. It'll be a flashback to the early 90's - chrome spheres over checkerboards, but with more blood effects, racial diversity, and World War II.

Can't wait for the games that make good, subtle use of this - a year after the technology becomes viable and they've finally stopped using it on every possible non-planar object.

I see nothing impressive about this car model ray traced, we need better examples than this lol

One can't really expect this to look "real". Mainly, because we're talking 30fps here..."Real-time", Baby!

To render a single frame that looks remotely realistic for something as complex as an automobile in an environment requires visual "effects" that can take hours to render on the fastest of systems: motion blur, depth of field (blurring of foreground and background elements), global illumination, ambient occlusion, reflection, refraction, caustics and the list goes on.

The fact that they got any type of ray-tracing to run in real-time is an accomplishment. I've worked in the biz for almost 15 years. Realistic or even "Pixar" style real-time rendering is still years away(my rough guesstimate is a decade).

What is this ? I could make a better looking car in 3ds max.Plus the environment was very poor done.
Look at ati ruby http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/AboutAMD/0,,51_52_15438_15106,00...
Ruby is not very good , but the buildings around were great compared to Nvidia's .
Nvidia used a Quadro Plex boxes to render the scene , while ati used only a 4870x2. Ati is years ahead.

Here are some very nice ray-tracing images:

http://hof.povray.org/

Sonner or later this will be possible in realtime. My money is on sooner. (As in "very few years".)

This is just Nvidia's news adverstisement...

Nvidia Physx is a cheat, Ageia PhysX isn’t

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8...

NVIDIA seems to be far ahead of the game with CUDA/Cg

Folding/Physx/Ray Tracing/etc.

It does not look real because they have had to skimp on high quality textures and bumpmapping effects. This was probably done to save frames and to get a demonstration out quickly before that new E3 type show Nvidia are going to be hosting. On another note i'm not even sure if it is possible yet to have ray traced lighting on a smooth texture and make it appear rough (ie the bumpmapping effect).

From what i can see on that car and the way that the reflections show bends with the ray traced lighting, it is the best way forward in terms of graphics development.

It may have all those fancy effects, but IMHO it falls short of providing a realistic scene.

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2008/065/942026_20080306_scree...

That's Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.

Two steps forward and now one step back. Raytracing may just be a waist of GPU power at the moment. The tricks of the trade already do a good job.

I'd spend the GPU power on physics. I'd like to see a FPS with bullet physics long before I want to see realtime raytracing on car reflections, current reflection tech is just fine and much faster.

Nice. Too bad they are obviously failing to mention that the number of polygons in the scene isn't really going to impact the preformance as much as most people would assume.

"Another advantage of ray tracing is that you can use many more polygons to render a scene without a dramatic performance impact compared to the rasterization approach So I "pimped up" some of the walls and floors in Quake 3 to see how well it performs. Instead of two triangles for a wall I used 5,000."
(http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=334&type=expert)

Looks good tho, but that's to be expected considering they're throwing WAY more GPU power at the problem then anyone can afford in a desktop.

Why raytracing? To sell more hardware, of course. Raytracing takes a lot more horsepower than the raster graphics we have become accustomed to. The Intel demos have used 16 or more cores. Imagine what AMD or NVIDIA will claim what you will 'need' in order to have a playable 3D game using raytracing? More than what you have in your system now, that is for certain.

I think the issue is, people are comparing what Nvidia has done to GT5. You'd really see what it can do if GT5 developers did the ray-tracing demo instead of Nvidia.

It's not like that's the peak of what it can do.

Don't judge this from screenshots. Need to see it in motion like any other demo of 3d tech.

One interesting thing to note with all this: In a real photo shot in meatspace (without photoshopping it) of a very reflective surface, there should be a visible "observer" or camera (with the associated person holding said camera). In photography of people, you can see the flash extensions in a person's eyes, for example.

I will be excited to see the day when the level of detail is so high that the game programmer has to add a body/person standing behind the viewpoint of the "shot" in order to get it "right" to make it that much harder to tell the difference (because of what the reflections reveal in the object).

Think of all the pictures of the Google vans in shop windows. Same thing.

It may be 3D, but it doesn't look real.

Compare to this: http://lh6.ggpht.com/_IkOFckO24HU/RzEvLFfIg5I/AAAAAAAAAFY/Z4-SclWeu...

For all the hype and computational horsepower, they've still got a long way to go in the realism department. When they make graphics that look like you can literally step into the car, fire it up and drive off, then I'll be impressed.

Color me unimpressed. The car looks great, but its surroundings look quite artificial (although the reflections in the glass are pretty sweet). Some of the shadows appear particularly hard.

I guess everyone knows this demo:
www.amd.com/cinema2
Which is also rendered using ray-tracing, here is more on the subject in this article:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/
So basically NVIDIA, AMD and Intel are pushing ray-tracing, although it be a long while before we see games using this technology and even then it's probably a hybrid technology to provide the best of both worlds.

EDIT: here is the complete Ruby demo:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,655714/News/Ruby_20_Screenshots_u...

hmmm.... veyron...