So this popped up in my Reader feed tonight:

[size=2](via Kotaku)

I'm not sure why it was posted with such sketchy details (not the user's code, says he will get hands on it later) but at least the guy who posted it is well-known for his technical expertise, mainly from the iCEenhancer mod for GTA4 (warning - turn down/off your sound the video music is pretty horrible IMO). So I would assume he has a valid reason for getting it online.

Anyone know whose work this is? Obviously stunning as a tech demo by itself, of course I wonder if there's any CPU cycles left after the rendering and physics

Wow. Sorry I don't know from where it comes, but reminds me of rendering with natural light... reloaded!

It's very pretty, but not actually that impressive. The reflections on the objects seem to be a static background cube-map and a ray-traced plane (objects don't seem to reflect each other), and the reflections on the ground are a standard planar reflection -- you can do all that on a Wii. It doesn't look ray-traced to me.

The BRDF's of the materials, the tone-mapping, IBL and bloom/glare are all very well balanced, which is what makes it look real... but these techniques are independent of rasterization/ray-tracing, and are par for the course right now.

The DOF implementation is very, very poor though and obviously done in post (definitely not real raytraced).

[Edit] Sorry I lied, the objects do reflect off each other in the ring scene (still not sure about the chess scene). I wonder if the screen pixels are rasterized, and then the reflections traced in their pixel shader? That would work for a simple scene like this, but wouldn't scale to a real environment easily.

Video is private now for some reason. Here's a mirror:

Ok, the neat raytracing part is the interiors of the gems. The rays are being traced through several internal 'faults' inside the gems, allowing complex internal reflection. When the ray exits the gem, it seems to then be tested against the ground plane and the background cube-map.