PCGH: There already is a Raytracing demo from Intel and Daniel Pohl, but the optical difference to the original rasterizer hasn't been very big.

Dr. Michael Vollmer: Please see this as a technical demo. The existing Quake 4 material had been taken, in order to make the technical effects visible - but that has nothing to do with the visual perfection. A complete demo, which contains the graphical aspect, too, is likely to look different. But there are all the basic features already, like shadow cast, surface reflections; you can already tinker with the idea that this component of visualization will be adopted by the gaming industry sooner or later.

PCGH: Are there game developers that already want to work with Raytracing?

Dr. Michael Vollmer: We keep in touch with companies all over the world - I dare say that in two to three years time we will see something. There already are some individual approaches, especially in the science sector, which show that Raytracing algorithms are scaling very well with the numbers of cores. But the migration to a new programming technology takes years; Raytracing is still in an early stage.