Nvidia and Intel have been at the crux of a graphics war for quite awhile now and it is seeming to heat up even further. The guys in green have announced their purchase of ray-tracing firm, Rayscale.
This acquisition may help Nvidia develop new ways to draw 3D images. The currently used method, rasterization is getting more and more complicated to process while ray-tracing, a method championed by Intel is yet to be attractive enough to be used by developers. Ray-tracing is thought to be too CPU-itensive to be used, though Intel claim that modern day processors have enough power to make it happen (Nvidia heavily dispute this).
According to VentureBeat:
As its name implies, it involves shooting a ray from a single point in a 3-D scene. If the ray hits an object, it assumes that whatever is behind the object is obscured and therefore doesn’t have to be drawn. Ray-tracing is better suited for the CPU (Nvidia disputes this) and so Intel is naturally a big proponent of it. The technique used to take too much horsepower, but now Intel contends that modern CPUs have the oomph to do it. Intel has shown Quake IV running on an eight-core CPU using ray-tracing techniques.
Rasterization, meanwhile, is getting more complicated. The graphics processor, such as those made by Nvidia, makes a “pass” at drawing a scene by rasterizing, or layering image effect such as colors, shadows, and lighting upon a scene. It does this repeatedly until the 3-D scene looks just right.
For the end consumer, this definitely means a better picture and hopefully at a better price.
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