...cool news!

o Future of 3d, Intel and Raytracing: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/94619 (german)
o New Flash Player supports H.264 http://www.tuaw.com/2007/08/21/adobe-adds-h-264-support-to-flash-player-9-beta/
o Werkkzeug3 is available! http://www.werkkzeug.com/

Wow.. :O)

Wish my German was a little stronger. The first link looks particularly interesting.

Aren't there sites which translate foreign languages too?

put the url in google then use the translate option next to it.
Basically about using raytracing in games by 2009 on intel quad core cpus, which do it 10x faster than the gpus right now.

I hope we move back to software renderers soon. It makes so much more sense than having this huge parallel rasterizer. And after having used shader languages extensively, I would really rather write my own renderer from scratch than work within the weird confines of the GPU.

Looks like they are using a deferred approach, which would explain the results...slower at first, faster than a rasterizer under more complexity.

I predicted this several months ago. :D

I don't remember what you've said but i think it's quite obvious that you choose a different approach if you're thinking years ahead (even more years if you have a significant marketshare in mind) or are about to release a 3d engine within a shorter timeframe for indies which has to run on todays hardware.

Am looking forward to raytracing being the future of realtime graphics will all proper lighting, reflections, shadows, radiosity etc and none of the huge number of fudges that are required with the current polygon API's.
If you just do it right the first time you don't need all these extra special-case scenarios. What shall we say, 5 years until the consoles are doing realtime raytracing at full high resolutions at full speed?

Getting rid of that compliancy test with various graphics cards, Direct X / OpenGL, drivers... Definately a fresh new start.