Ruby, voxels and ray tracing

Intro

My name is Ray Tracey. I'm a graphics enthusiast with a passion for lifelike interactive graphics.

Recently, I was struck by a realtime demo of a photorealistic city scene that was shown at an AMD/ATI event. It looked like something that came straight out of my imagination. For years I have been wondering when interactive graphics would reach this level of quality. I was interested to say the least.



A week later, AMD revealed that this city scene was part of their new Ruby demo for the Radeon 4800 cards: they showed the same scene, but this time there was moving traffic and people. Ruby appeared, running for her life from a giant killer machine. Once again, I was in awe: it looked unbelievable, I didn't expect to see such graphics within the next three years on consumer hardware. So after I witnessed this graphical marvel, I decided to find out more about it. After several hours of Google'ing, I had come to the disheartening conclusion that there was almost no info on the demo to be found, except for some lousy quality youtube video's and a small PR paragraph on the AMD site. But I searched further... The small snippets of info that I did find, stimulated me to write this blog as a "resource" that bundles all the publicly available information on this technology and as a means for better understanding of the tech to anyone interested.