While I don't have the technical expertise of John Carmack or David Kirk, I'm going to try to apply some gamer commonsense to the debate over Ray Tracing versus Raster graphics for PC games.

Ray Tracing in simple terms

Ray Tracing isn't new, it's used for most of the animated 3D stuff we watch in movies or on TV. The basic idea is simple, create realistic images by calculating each beam of light, how it bounces off 3D objects, reflecting colours and texture.

Think of how slow it must be to calculate every light beam. It's amazing that we can generate detailed images this way, but it's not fast, an enormous amount of computing power went into every 1/24th of a second frame in Ratatouille. Photorealistic ray tracing doesn't happen in real-time, not yet at least and I'd bet not in the near future either.

In contrast, games currently employ a bag of rasterization tricks to simulate 3D environments. I'll inadequately apply the analogy of cardboard movie sets to raster graphics, where the games prop up prepainted walls and then apply special effects here and there. It generally works and the audience isn't usually aware of the how or why.

Both technologies are dependant on polygons to structure the 3D shapes, so they will have some of the same limitations in visual quality. It's more about the lighting than anything else.

From Intel?

Intel is selling Ray Tracing as snake oil, mark my words.

Intel has been successful at a lot of things, but quality 3D graphics cards / chipsets are not one of them. Oh sure, they make a profit with their integrated graphics, but they do so by selling absolutely useless junk to the masses that's utterly incapable of playing current games. I'm using strong rhetoric here, but I don't think I'm overstating at all.

I just cannot fathom Intel bringing about a new revolution within this industry with the way they've been so readily producing garbage chipsets. Tim Sweeney is right, he opened my eyes to this fact: Intel is the most responsible for the "death" of PC gaming.

It's coming to DirectX 11

From what I've heard, it doesn't take much for Microsoft to rubberstamp something into the DirectX API, especially from an affluent partner like Intel. It doesn't mean it will get used by game developers, or even supported by the graphics hardware other than Intel's. Besides, DirectX on the PC is losing its relevance along with PC games market, so why bother looking ahead at DX11?

We're far more likely to see ray casting hybrids for games, but even then the incentive for developers isn't very high because there won't be revolutionary changes in visuals or framerate.

The Success

Earlier this month, I threw Ubuntu Linux on my roommate's PC and was astonished at how slick and painless it was. In some ways, the ease and simplicity surpassed Windows installations and even pre-installed Windows (which inevitably requires more tweaking and updating than it should). I hadn't even pre-planned the Ubuntu installation, it was on a whim, but I had it running Portal smoothly in no time at all.

That was just one installation, one machine. Just a snapshot of success.

The Quirks and Snags

On two other PCs, I had troubles with drivers. There are no workable Linux drivers for my Creative Labs X-Fi, not even for basic sound. Creative Labs themselves are the maintainer of OpenAL, one of the audio APIs on Linux, so that boggles me to say the least. But it doesn't really matter to me who's fault it is: if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

Speaking of which, I couldn't get 5.1 surround sound upmixing for my music to work on any of the PCs. The entire interface for configuring audio on the Ubuntu desktop confounded me.

I soon ran into quirks, the kind that are fixable but the sort that I associate with the geek nature of a Linux Desktop. One example is the Numlock state, which is set to Off by default regardless of Bios settings and whether or not the light is on. Confusing to most people, but not hard to fix if you're okay with editing the right config file. My roommate thought Linux was just broken with the Numlock key and I can understand her assumption, you take it for granted with other OSes that it just works right.

I don't mean to Wine

I also had difficulty with Wine, probably because of the aforementioned driver issues. I know Wine isn't a standard feature for Ubuntu, but that's part of the point, running games is paramount as far as I'm concerned. For serious games on Linux, that means Wine. Native gaming on Linux is as abysmal as gaming on a Mac. What Linux really needs is another Loki to actively progress SDL, OpenGL and other game-related APIs and drivers.

My roommate is happier with Ubuntu, it runs smoother than Vista and most of the time Solitaire and Minesweeper will satisfy her. She is quite pleased with the selection of casual games that came with Ubuntu, but on the other hand she owns a few Popcap games and rebooting back to Windows for those is a pain.

Get it there

Linux has always been good at catering to geeks, it's the OS where any coder can add whatever features they want. But a distribution like Ubuntu, which focuses on usability, needs to address the quirks. And they need to approach major vendors like Creative Labs and get those drivers made, because properly functioning hardware is the core of usability.

Entertainment is an essential part of any desktop OS, whether it's listening to surround sound, watching movies, or playing games. Linux itself just needs better solutions in the media area, especially games where the real trick is catering to developers. Wine is impressive, but from an end-user's perspective it's very inconsistent. The native APIs and interfaces have to not only work, but they need to attract serious developers for games and applications.

So the answer from this gamer's perspective? The Linux desktop has jumped leaps and bounds in recent years, but it's still not there yet.

Update: I've posted a followup to this article since the release of Patch 2.2.3.

If you've had difficulties with sound this patch, you're far from the only one. The explanation is a bit mind-boggling.

In some bizarre twist of executive decision, Blizzard has taken the existing audio hardware support out of their game and flushed it down the drain, allowing software channels only. Blizzard's own technical support has been grasping at straws, looking for solutions that aren't there, then switching to a new mantra that claims it's fine.

Even seemingly unrelated issues like framerate loss and extra latency have been confirmed by Blizzard techs as being caused by the new software sound system. This is just a small sampling of the related threads on their support forums:

• Sound popping, cutting, and...slicing?
• Sound all crackley?
• Sound Blaster Sound Problems
• Sound fine, but game sound spamming me? Help.
• No Sound Period
• I Sit Here in Silence
• My FPS is dead with this new patch
• Latency: From 350 to 1200 after patch day.
• Ugh.. Latest Patch and SB Audigy Card
• Why did I buy a sound card?
• Sound quality reduced
• Ventrilo with 2.2
• Blue! Some audio testing results
• New Sound software causing crashes
• Voice Emotes Sounds & Much More Not Working
• Please admit your wrong- allow hardware sound
• Sound Card + WoW = 1.4k ms ping
• My Music, and Patch 2.2??

You get the idea.

Most of the CM suggestions on these threads involve turning off audio acceleration completely on your PC, which (aside from not fixing most of the problems and being a horrible downgrade in quality) is an absolutely atrocious idea for any other software that you use. The next time you try to watch a movie in 5.1 surround sound, or play a different game, you're likely to get poor quality or stuttery sound there too. The usage of audio hardware channels is very standard.

They are now clearing the Technical forums of audio software channel problems, locking complaint threads and insisting that players bring up the issue in the Suggestion forums, calling complaints about incorrectly working sound "spam".

It must have seemed like a cost-effective choice to someone who's deaf, because they've thrown away quality audio to save a few bucks in supporting multiple OSes (Mac, WinXP and Vista) under the same API (FMOD, which Blizzard comically refers to as their "unified sound engine" even though it's a third-party API) without using any extensions.

The most boggling part? Creative Labs offered to assist Blizzard with a pre-existing extension patch to FMOD which they've already provided and tested for Bioshock.

For decades as a PC game customer, I've never once seen a developer drop existing hardware support. It's such shoddy work, after 3 years of subscriptions from millions of players. The arrogance of this decision is astonishing.

I strongly urge that anyone who has been experiencing problems or just lousy sound quality since the 2.2 patch, sign this thread on WoW's Suggestion Forums to get Blizzard to bring back audio hardware support to fix their broken sound.

This is one where Blizzard should actually apologize to their playerbase for.