Interesting article on Raytracing for games.

Here's a cool article showcasing raytracing applications that are being tested on the hardware of today (yorkfield quad cores) and the processors of tomorrow. It's a good article to read if you have trouble understanding how games of today work (cheating with effects and lighting), and how that compares to raytraced visuals (realistic lighting system that renders a 3d image based on light rays, how they bounce, how many times they bounce, etc), which is used in CGI.The games of today (less and less) cheat with baked lighting information, and specular intensities per map that help fake light's reflection on objects. Even the latest games like Unreal Tournament 3 rely mostly on basic and dynamic lights to render out their frames, dynamic lights being lights that cast shadows on objects or can be moved, which is still very taxing on any system. Most of what you see in games are spot lights used to light up a scene, but you cant move them, turn them off, have them cast shadows on moving objects...because they are baked into the lightmap of the level.Raytracing on the other hand, used in CGI, lets you determine the amount of light rays spawned by a light, their direction, and how many times they bounce on an object. The more rays you have per light, the more accurate or detailed the lighting is. You can also determine (at least in CGI), how many times those lights bounce from an object to another object, thus creating ambient light by having lights bounce from object to object to walls etc. You can also set how many rays are spawned by each bounce or hit, and so on. Thus if you think about 1 ray of light in your scene, that one ray of light will hit its first object, then bounce and create two or three more rays. Those three rays will them attack their own objects and spawn more and more rays to create lighting in a scene. And that is from one ray, from one light, where you could set the light to spawn anywhere from 50 to 500 rays.All this and we havent even taked about diffuse, speculars, normals, refraction, and reflection.You can now imagine why raytracing would be very very hard from a computer to render real time, and that is why you are getting the progress based on multi-core systems now. That's a basic explanation, so anyway, here's the link for those interested:http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=506%26type=expert%26pid=1