game graphics

Possibly everyone here has already savoured, from:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532&type=overview


"...CARMACK: It’s interesting in that the algorithms would be something
that, it’s almost unfortunate in the aspect that these algorithms would
take great advantage of simpler bit-level operations in many cases and
they would wind up being implemented on this 32-bit floating point
operation-based hardware.  Hardware designed specifically for sparse
voxel ray casting would be much smaller and simpler and faster than a
general purpose solution but nobody in their right mind would want to
make a bet like that and want to build specific hardware for technology
that no one has developed content for.  The idea would be that you have
to have a general purpose solution that can approach all sorts of things
and is at least capable of doing the algorithms necessary for this type
of ray tracing operation at a decent speed.  I think it’s pretty clear
that that’s going to be there in the next generation.  In fact, years
and years ago I did an implementation of this with complete software
based stuff and it was interesting; it was not competitive with what you
could do with hardware, but it’s likely that I’ll be able to put
something together this year probably using CUDA.  If I can make
something that renders a small window at a modest frame rate and we can
run around some geometrically intricate sparse voxel octree world and
make a 320x240 window at 10 fps and realize that on next-generation
hardware that’s optimized more for doing this we can go ahead and get
1080p 60 Hz on there. 

That would be the justification that would make everybody sleep a whole
lot of better that there is going to be some win coming out this. ..."
</carmack>

Geof Bishop