Yesterday, at IDF in San Francisco, Intel showed off a six-core Gulftown rig with Larrabbe graphics.

The new discrete GPU was shown in action, rendering a real time ray tracing scene. The scene, borrowed from Enemy Territory: Quake Wards depicted a ship straight out of Kevin Costner's Waterworld flop, and Intel claims the reflections on the water were generated with just 10 lines of code in C++.

Unfortunately, it shows, as it's pretty obvious not enough samples were used in the reflection, and changes in geometry on the water's surface are a bit rough and jumpy. In all fairness, it's still very early in the game to make any conclusion about Larrabbe's prospects or performance. This is merely an early technology demonstration and the main thing is that it works.

Ray-tracing has been around in off-line 3D for ages, but optimizing it to run real time will be quite an undertaking and it has the potential to turn the way 3D content is developed upside down. It will offer a much higher level of realism, as interactions between objects in the scene are much more realistic with ray tracing. Shadows, ambient lighting, reflections and refractions stand to benefit a great deal from ray tracing implementation. However, in terms of number crunching, it is still too demanding to be used in real time 3D to the extent we see in off-line rendering.

You can find a short video of the demo at CNET.