Researchers in the United States, Portugal and the United Kingdom predict that the solution to the high performance requirements of ray tracing may be to mix old ray tracing algorithms with quantum computing In a recently published research white paper, quantum computing increased the workload of ray tracing and improved the performance by 190%. This process is accomplished by limiting the number of calculations required for each light.
Ray tracing in graphics technology makes the game an evolutionary leap, especially the rendering method of the game. However, compared with complexity, performance and the ability of developers to correctly adopt this process are secondary. The problem is the hardware and computing requirements of ray tracing technology, as well as the necessity of specific hardware, which limits the use of core technology by most users.
The researchers described how quantum computing has the potential to minimize the processing tax caused by ray tracing technology. The team took a 128x128 image with ray tracing enabled and optimized the image using three different strategies. These three processes are classical rendering technology, non optimized quantum rendering, and then the optimization of quantum rendering. The first technique calculates 2.678 billion light intersections on three-dimensional images, providing 64 for each individual light. The unoptimized method reduces the first number by half, requiring only 33.6 light intersections, equivalent to 1.366 billion light intersections. Using the optimized quantum technology and classical system, the final attempt presents an image of 896000 intersections, with 22.1 intersections per ray.
The most important disadvantage of this technology is quantum computing system. Quantum computers and devices are currently developing nisq, the noise medium scale quantum product category. These intricate systems are not the best in performance, so rendering takes hours to correctly calculate each image. This category is very suitable for simulation, but at present, it is hardly a viable option for rendering games.
Despite the good results, the technology is far from being used in production. In the past year or two, with the current trend of quantum computing, we have only seen a small number of quantum computing available. IBM plans to increase the number of quantum computing in the next few years, but it is unclear how much progress the technology will make in a short time.