It turns out that ray tracing on a 42-year-old computer is actually possible, if you’re willing to wait 17 hours for each frame to load
We’re hearing the term “ray tracing” thrown around more and more these days, as it’s one of the features that’s almost synonymous with modern, top-notch visuals. It is a rendering method that allows shadows and light to be rendered in a more realistic, lifelike manner, and is included as a graphics option in many current generation games. Needless to say, this is probably not the kind of technology you’d think a 42-year-old computer could even dream of.
However, it turns out that the trusty ZX Spectrum, released by Sinclair Research in 1982, could do this all along, at least with the brains of Google Zurich senior software engineer Gabriel Gambetta behind it. As noted by Hackaday (through PC gamer), Gambetta has shared how he managed to use Spectrum’s built-in programming language, Sinclair BASIC, to get the computer to produce a glossy, ray-traced frame.
Before we get into it, it’s important to note that the ZX Spectrum has its limitations. As Gambetta notes, the processor is about 1,000 times slower than that of a modern computer, has a whopping 48 KB of RAM, can display only 15 colors, and has a resolution of 256×176. Needless to say, if you’re expecting a nice, realistic screenshot Cyberpunk 2077 If it doesn’t come out, it won’t, but what you can get is a still image of three colorful 3D objects with surprisingly detailed shadows.
Gambetta went through the entire process in a detailed post on his website. But in short, after porting some ray-tracing code to Sinclair BASIC and doing a lot of testing with higher resolutions and optimizations, his final test was able to produce an image that he “stared at in disbelief for a minute.”
This end result still suffers somewhat from attribute collisions: you can clearly see that some of the red in the image blends into yellow (the blue and green do that too, but to a lesser extent). Additionally, it took about 17 hours to render, which works out to about 0.000016 frames per second. So not the fastest output. Regardless, given the limitations of the computer, this is certainly impressive and a truly fascinating experiment. I would encourage anyone interested to check it all out at Gambetta’s website.
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