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Future iPhones May Offer More Realistic Lighting and Shadows with New Ray-Tracing GPU

Here's an image that shows the hardware they add to a normal "Rogue" implementation to have dedicated RT functionality.

1_PowerVR%20GR6500%20GPU%20-%20PowerVR%20Wizard%20GPUs.png
 
lulumink said:
haha, such a smart marketing strategy article.
this can only fool people without CGI knowledge.

Ray Tracing is not even possible on desktop computers yet.
It's very computation intensive algorithm that can only found in CG movie and FX effects.

Dream on.
Click to expand...

You're joking right? Ray tracing software came out for the Amiga running a now ancient Motorola 68000 way back in the late 1980s (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sculpt_3D). Do you not remember "the juggler": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yJNGwIcLtw (story: http://home.comcast.net/~erniew/juggler.html ) It blew everyone's mind back then and I can't believe there is something to be built into a phone- A PHONE!!!- to do it quickly (and on portable battery power & mobile chips). WOW!
 
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macchiato2009 said:
seriously ? who cares about "More Realistic Lighting and Shadows" on a phone screen ? :rolleyes:


on a computer screen or a HDTV, ok, that makes sense

on a phone, seriously, i don't give a damn

i just want my apps to run smoothly and my phone to last more than a few hours before running out of juice
Click to expand...

If it was just about the phone screen, you have a point. But the iOS/ARM environment does include larger screens - iPad and Apple TV, the latter of which has been rumored to be moving towards gaming for a while now. And it's still an open question as to whether Apple will someday move the Mac platform onto ARM.

While a fair number of folks think that iPhone and iPad are two separate animals, that are used differently, you can't bet on it - people who own both iPad and iPhone switch seamlessly between the two, and like to have all their stuff available on both. So what if the hot game looks better on the larger screen? The iPhone/iPod Touch-only people will want it anyway, and they'll want it even more if their iPhone 6s has a 5.7" screen.

This isn't a matter of the general public understanding or caring about rasterization or ray tracing, it's a matter of, "Wow, this looks great!" Will they analyze the scene for things like reflections, transparency, and shadows? No more than they analyze a tune's harmonic and rhythmic structure, or the use of metaphor and rhyme in the lyric. Everyone knows what looks "real," even if they don't have the slightest idea as to why.

To me, gaming has to be the tip of the iceberg. How might it be used for Maps? Will it be able to generate visual effects on the desktop with greater energy efficiency? How would greater photo-realism affect animated advertising? Predictable uses are, well, predictable. It's the unexpected uses that turn out to be the most exciting.
 
This will enhance the reflections and shadows currently in the iOS 7 user interface and make all the elements look even more realistic than they do now.
 
Imagine the great potential here. Once it's implemented to Apple TV it will be closer and closer to entirely replace the home console.

Too bad development would be a bit left out though. It's great but for a few next years it will be constantly lagging behind due to "mobile parts" while PS and Xbox does not have the concern of power or heat efficiency.

Apple should have research a special and much more powerful chip for their Apple TV since it does not require battery nor power limited. I am willing to pay $499 for a beefed up, fully featured Apple TV a la Mac Mini only with gaming and media center needs in mind.

With that aside, it's still a great news. I've been waiting for the next gen iPhone. It's time to retire my old trusty 4S.
 
Future iPhones May Offer More Realistic Lighting and Shadows with New Ray-Tra...

So with all these nifty capabilities… will we see a return to 3D stuff in iOS? Maybe not iOS 8, but 9? Lol.
 
Aren't current smartphone apps/games eating away at Nintendo's profit? Why buy a Wii U when you can get the same quality games on your iOS/Android device?
 
chrmjenkins said:
It has dedicated hardware to do it. Just imagine the current iPhone GPU with extra hardware slapped in to do this. It's an alternate way of lighting as opposed to current rasterization methods. It's more physically based, so it's more accurate, but very resource intensive.

I have a hard time believing Apple will use their precious die space to include this, however. Since they won't be direct users of it, they'd have to convince their developers of its usefulness.
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Nice leap to assume this makes the gpu bigger. A company that has spent seven years trying to deliver this to mobile gpus did not likely say "oh screw it just make the chip bigger and use more resources". They could have done that seven years ago.
 
chrmjenkins said:
Millions. It's the promise of new consoles every generation. Imagine a stealth game where your dynamically cast shadow gives away your position/presence. Just one example.
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They can do that now with stencil shadows.

Course raytracing can do it far more accurately and produce a wider variety of effects without as much memory overhead, since it's more or less emulating radiosity/photon bounces. But it does have its costs. Unlike rasterization, raytracing performance doesn't scale well to higher resolutions. Assuming they're able to make a mobile GPU powerful enough to do it, a raytraced iPad game running at 2048x1536 would probably eat through your battery in about 5 minutes.

That's the major reason why raytracing hasn't replaced rasterization just yet. It'd be nice being able to make models where the reflectivity of its texture is accurately determined by light bouncing off the material as opposed to a shader that convincingly fakes it (and requires considerably more video memory to do so), but you'd have a difficult time rendering it at even current HD standards while maintaining a good framerate, let alone retina displays.
 
Well my desktop graphics may suck but at least my next phone will have more realistic rendering.

Long live the new apple.
 
Renzatic said:
BOOM! You're wrong!

...it just takes a card roughly the length of your arm to do it.
Click to expand...

That article is a year old and says this technology can't come to mobile devices for another 4-5 years. Subtract a year because it's a year old and we're looking at 3-5 years before this technology is available on mobile devices. If Apple aggressively pursues this, we might see it in Fall 2016.

It seems much more likely that Apple will add these things to the MacPro as a BTO this year. Maybe the iMac or the MBP will get it as an option next year.
 
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