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Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.worldEnglish · 1 year ago

Ray tracing made possible on 42-year-old ZX Spectrum: 'reasonably fast, if you consider 17 hours per frame to be reasonably fast'

www.pcgamer.com

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Ray tracing made possible on 42-year-old ZX Spectrum: 'reasonably fast, if you consider 17 hours per frame to be reasonably fast'

www.pcgamer.com

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.worldEnglish · 1 year ago
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The 1980s computer produces surprisingly gorgeous ray-traced results, but be prepared to measure performance by hour rather than second.
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  • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This computer is illegal in Florida, Texas, and Russia.

    • khannie@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Is this true? Sounds like there’s a story you’re not telling us

      • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s a rainbow thing 🏳️‍🌈

        • khannie@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Ha! You got me.

  • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    It’s like playing chess by mail, but with Doom.

  • teft@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The human eye can only see 1 frame per 18 hours so I consider this reasonably fast.

    • Laticauda@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      You may need to consult a doctor.

    • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Are you a tree

      • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Nah, just The Lorax.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Now write it in Z80 assembly instead of basic and see how much faster you can get it to run.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      So true.

      When I switched from basic to assembler on a Trash 80 Model 1, it was truly night and day

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What resolution? I’m guessing 64x48?

    • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
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      1 year ago

      The strain of going from a 32 x 22 image to a 256 x 176 one is evident in how much longer this secondary image took to render. From 879.75 seconds (nearly 15 minutes) to 61,529.88 seconds (over 17 hours). Luckily, some optimisations and time-saving tweaks meant this could be brought down to 8,089.52, or near-ish two and a half hours.

      Those are really reasonable values. I guess my laptop would take that long to render a 4k image as well.

      • pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        Really depends on the complexity of the frame being rendered for how fast your laptop can render it

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          1 year ago

          Ray tracing speed primary depends on the number of pixels, not the complexity of the scene.

          • pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            The complexity of your scene makes a huge difference. If your scene has fewer things for light to bounce off of, doing the ray tracing is much faster

            (Source: I do blender renders with cycles)

            • frezik@midwest.social
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              1 year ago

              So I’m not exactly sure how Blender implements this. There can be a few details that can make a huge difference. Just for starters, is Blender rendering 100% ray tracing here, or is it a hybrid model with a rasterizer. Rasterizers tend to scale with the number of objects, while ray tracing scales with the number of pixels. A hybrid will be, obviously, something in between.

              Then there is how it calculates collisions. There is a way to very quickly detect collisions of AABB boxes (basically rectangles that surround your more complicated object), but it takes a little effort to implement this and get the data structures right. You can actually do Good Enough sometimes by matching every ray to every AABB, and then you do more complex collision checking against what’s left, but there’s a certain scale where that breaks down.

              Blender is generally very well done from what little I know of it, but I’m not sure how it handles all these tradeoffs.

  • StrongHorseWeakNeigh@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I misread it at first and read it as 17 frames per hour and I thought, “Yeah, that’s reasonably fast.”

    • fluxion@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My brain initially assumed 17 fps and I was like dayamnnnn

  • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I mean that’s pretty fucking impressive imo. I figured a RT frame would take days to render on hardware that old

    • VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      And back when that computer was contemporary, it would have. We’ve learned a hell of a lot since Nvidia announced they had cracked real-time ray tracing all those years ago.

  • Poggervania@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    tbf that’s probably on par with the performance Cyberpunk 2077 was doing on release

  • Num10ck@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    i once took 12+ hours to raytrace on an 8mhz Amiga only to realize that it didn’t have any light sources and so was pitch black.

    • istoff@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I share that memory. At least twice

  • metaStatic@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    How many btc per decade is that?

  • fixerdude2@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Still remember loading games from cassette tapes on this thing and the Z80.

    • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      “is it still loading or did it fail?”

      ah, plus ça change…

  • SharkAttak@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I can’t help to think that all that amount of effort could be better spent.

    • AnAngryAlpaca@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Ray tracing in MySQL instead? https://demozoo.org/productions/268459/

    • 𝚐𝚕𝚘𝚠𝚒𝚎@h4x0r.host
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      1 year ago

      I was thinking the same sort of thing. What’d I’d kill for the time to spend on useless shit heh.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      But where’s the fun in that?

  • bandwidthcrisis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Back in the day we had to just use VU-3D.

    https://youtu.be/6Em-CWYZhG8?feature=shared

  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s not that the bear dances well, it’s that the bear dances at all.

  • Jarmer@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    700 years worth of compute to do about an hour of gaming that I just did on my pc at home in realtime … damn.

    Did I math it right? I was averaging about 100 fps in hogwarts for about an hour.

    • Illecors@lemmy.cafe
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      1 year ago

      Say you generated 86’400’000 frames. 17h a frame that’s roughly 16’767 years.

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