Last week I picked a Playstation 3 because I am getting a new TV soon. I wanted to get a Blue-Ray player but being that I am also a gamer I didn’t just want a stand alone Blue-Ray player so I got a PS3. Of course being the geek that I am I wanted to see what all I could do to the PS3 as far as hacks and such like changing out the hard drive. That’s when I came across some videos on YouTube about using 3 PS3’s to ray trace a model in real time. But first if you don’t know what ray tracing is here is some info.

In computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of photorealism; usually higher than that of typical scanline rendering methods, but at a greater computational cost. This makes ray tracing best suited for applications where the image can be rendered slowly ahead of time, such as in still images and film and television special effects, and more poorly suited for real-time applications like computer games where speed is critical. Ray tracing is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and chromatic aberration.

This isn’t the first time that some one has done ray tracing in real time in gaming. A few years ago I remember see a video of someone taking Quake 3 and doing real time ray tracing. Of course that video is on YouTube as well. If the video below plays fast just pause it and hit play again. I linked to the high quality version so that might be the reason.

Now what use to take a shit load of PC’s at a college can now be done using just 3 PS3’s in your house. Maybe it’s just me but I think that is awesome.