Brigade 2 ray tracing engine now running on 1 Titan GPU.

This is still Brigade 2 internally but there's starting to implement Brigade 3 features. They were mainly interested in showing off some of the better soft shadows and other lighting techniques they have going on here compared to earlier versions. Some new interesting info from Sam's blog and YT video comments.

-Real-time path traced test of an 4968 instances of an animated character.

-each on one triangle of the Stanford bunny mesh (4968 triangles).

-Each character contains over 60k triangles

- 300 million dynamic triangles in total

-Notice real-time color bleeding, reflections, soft shadows and lighting from an HDR environment

-Brigade supports AMD through OpenGL

-Dev team: Sam Lampere, Jeroen van Schijndel, Rick de Bruijne and Hayssam Keilany.

Anonymous: This is Brigade 2(see on screens) or 3 which 3x time faster? And would you add features like complex lighing improvements(400% faster) etc in the future?

Sam: This is still Brigade 2 with some features from Brigade 3 (if you will). Brigade 3 is currently under heavy development and its quality of lighting and materials will blow you away, it's of a completely different level compared to what we have now and is offers the same quality of Octane (minus Oxtane powerful material system).

Anonymous said: Sam Lapere,

Great news about Brigade 3! Will it be faster and noise free compare to Brigade 2? I'd imagine you guys are still focusing on the renderer and not so much about the pipeline(getting content(mesh, sound,ai,etc into brigade)tools something like UDK?

Sam: Brigade 3 will be a lot faster and almost noisefree compared to Brigade 2. We're implementing some techniques that will greatly reduce the noise without affecting the image quality. More importantly, the old material and lighting system has been thrown out completely and is replaced by a new one, which is essentially identical to that of Octane Render, so you won't be able to tell the difference between the two. So if you're not yet familiar with Octane's quality, believe me it will blow you away.

Right now, we're also working on tools to make it easier for game devs to start mucking around with Brigade.

colocolo: Here i have a very fancy question. ;)

If a game studio would make a game with your latest Brigade version to which movie (year) could its overall graphics quality be compared to? One reference point could be Star Wars: Episode 1 made in 1999.

Sam: It would be comparable to a movie that uses path traced GI and reflections, like Cloudy with a chance of meatballs (rendered with Arnold) or more recently Monster's University. Brigade doesn't support hair/fur/volumetrics (yet), but it can produce very realistic images. You'll see it once we reveal the true Brigade engine 3.

colocolo: Another question. You have said that in 1 or 2 years we could see a Brigade powered game. Do you think that will happen considering that PC games are always kept at the almost same graphics level as console games. Its hard to imagine how this supergraphics-games could fit into the upcoming PS4/XBox1 game repertoire. Do you think Sony or Microsoft could prevent that game studios suddenly make games with such superior PC graphics?

Sam: To be honest, I couldn't care less about MS or Sony or any other next gen console manufacturer. A Brigade powered game will probably not run on PS4 or Xbox and cloud gaming will make consoles obsolete in a few years, so your best bet will be Brigade games in the cloud.

aljowen: This path tracing is getting good. Just having that many polygons at once must be quite a performance hit.

Sam: Brigade doesn't really care how much geometry you throw at it and can effortlessly handle billions of triangles.

Nuninho: Are you runinng 2 GTX 580's?

Sam: this ran on 1 GTX Titan.

So glad to see these guys going full speed ahead of this. Barring any major setbacks we are actually looking at the first game, running on a real ray tracing engine in real time, within 2-3 years. If the over/under is 3 years, I would take the under.

*sigh* Ray tracing has been working for decades and running in real time for about as long where the only difference has been scaling. No need to wait 2-3 years.

I'd be more impressed if the video quality didn't look like utter shit at 720.

You're referring to ray-tracing technical demos, which mainly display the ability to do ray-traced lighting and reflections, whicha dime a dozen on Youtube, and this is actually a ray-tracing game engine/render capable of actually supporting a video game.

Ray-tracing's actually been around since the same time as rasterized graphics. You just couldn't make video games with them running on anything remotely close to being attainable for the general public. Heck even Disney's Pixar didn't find them feasible for movies up until a few years ago due to the amount of time it required to render a frame in comparison to rasterization. This is kind of along the same lines as you downplaying other tech that existed in mainly non-applicable, non-practical, experimental stages.

The question is what publisher would spend the money to make a game using ray tracing when the PS4/XBone aren't nearly powerful enough to run it? Plus one Titan costs like $1000 and they said it is running at 30 fps on that. You'd need to to quadruple performance to make it cost effective and while engine and hardware improvements go super fast, 2 years isn't nearly enough time to get that large of an increase. So I guess, yes, in 2 or so years time it will be possible to make a ray traced game. But it's going to be a good 5 years before enough people have hardware capable of running it to make a full game out of it. But definitely cool stuff. I think the dude was right when he said that cloud computing is what is going to make this take off and that is a good 5 years away at least simply due to the slow internet connections in many parts of the world.

>5 billion triangles

I was hoping this was an Iron Brigade 2 demo...

Yeah, maybe if they demonstrated something that couldn't be achieved with a 570 and geometry instancing & LoDs I might be impressed.

Real time ray tracing isn't the silver bullet. Due to the heavy branching nature of ray tracing algorithms it isn't even a good fit for GPUs. Yeah the new GPUs do branching but it's still better suited for just brute forcing big arrays of data; no logic, no branching. I think Intel's push for real time ray tracing on big multicore CPUs makes much more sense.

Well a video game that goes into development a year from today, if we assume that's when Brigade 3 is ready, won't come out for at least 1-2 years. By then you shouldn't have trouble finding a Titan at a decent price or another equivalent.

But no there's no chance of this on console games unless streamed down from a cloud. But this is exciting for anyone that's interested in even a modest PC 2-3 years down the road. It's very much doable.

It's very exciting for gaming in general and gaming development. The increase in geometry, the superior material creation and the amount of work it's going to save developers from having to hack so many effects in order to pull off what ray tracers can do easily in rasterized graphics is going to be wonderful.

From a graphical point of view, this is going to produce the generational jump that we should have had and a lot of people were expecting or hoping to see. And from a developer's point of view, imagine going from having to spend weeks or even months developing some proprietary tech for water, having your artists mess around with specular maps, lighting, and all kinds of tricks to get water to somewhat resemble water which never looks satisfying compared to simply going to a drop down box, typing in 1.33 for the index of refraction, and you're basically done. Everything else just falls into place as it should.

So because development will be cheaper to begin with, I don't think it's going to take a long time for an adoption rate to kick in. PC devs still make PC exclusives today. Ray-tracing engines will make it that much cheaper to make games with smaller teams, in shorter periods of time. And there's just so many talented people that have gotten into 3D animation design, that love the simplicity of working with them, that have experience in dealing with physical based renderers, and the quality they produce that could easily transition into gaming. With rasterized graphics, it's something of a nightmare. It's going to open a lot of doors too. If you were interested in game development but found it daunting before, now's the time to take a look into it. It's a good opportunity, because there is no doubt, this is going to be the future. It's a certainty.

This isn't a far away in the future type dream as when talk of ray tracing usually popped up before. It's literally now, around the corner. They really mean it this time. I mean it's running on a consumer card, now. Expensive sure, but it shortly won't be.

Yo, can it run Minecraft?