Raytracing on a Graphing Calculator (again) 

Don't mind me, I'm just playing Doom 2016 raytraced on my Ti-84 Plus CE while you're stuck playing a bad Pacman port in math classes

Back in the dark ages when I was in school, I put several formulas into my TI calculator instead of memorizing them. A classmate tattled to the teacher who replied with, "If he can actually figure out how to do that, I won't stop him."

Graphing calculators can do this but can’t draw a sin graph without taking like a full hour

at this point, 'computer' and 'calculator' are synonyms of each other, just as much as 'compute' and 'calculate' are.

too cool - i struggled to get this type of thing done with opengl

I guess he's the guy who made it possible for Nasa to go on moon with 4Kb of Ram in 1969

The TI-Nspire is WAY more powerful. It can already run doom in full speed and color! With the source code out for Super Mario 64, I bet it could be possible to get it running on there. If not the TI-Nspire, definitely the TI-Nspire II (Which is 2.5 times faster)

Nerdy thing i love about this video: the font you use in your infographics is *Segoe UI!* It's the main stylistic font in most Microsoft products, and has been their logo text since *Windows 8!* It's also used in the Microsoft-published indie darling game *Ori and the Blind Forest!* It's such a clear and official-looking font and as much as people crap on Microsoft (fair) I absolutely love the look of it. Anyway awesome video!!

It's very nice to see someone working for efficient code, even as a hobby. Too much nowadays is just incredibly bloated. Good luck with future endeavors!

This was a real trip down memory lane. I used to love writing ray-tracers using languages and hardware completely unsuitable for them and was very familiar with fixed point math. I never quite cracked global illumination but there was no internet back then, it was all from books. I've always felt that ray tracing is the best way to learn about computer graphics because it's so intuitive - you don't even need to know any matrix math. To do the same thing using OpenGL or DirectX is an absolute nightmare because you have to master matrices, cameras, lights, shader programs, fragments etc. You can literally write a ray tracer in a dozen lines of code provided you have some function to draw pixels. You get so many things for free with RT, for example 3D textures and constructive solid modelling, because you're dealing with surfaces and objects and not millions of flat triangles. And there's a lot you can do to speed it up, which I'm surprised you didn't cover. For example using bounding volumes or adaptive sampling.

“As always, it could always be improved. When writing some of the more complex fixed point functions, I got a little lazy and just used the floating point library instead of writing it myself in assembly.” is one of the most insane sentences i've heard said so casually

Awesome video

I know it's not the focus of the video but blender's raytracing engine, cycles, had a complete overhaul in 3.0 and renders waaay faster, especially on low end devices.

I wasn't expecting another upload for atleast a month!

It’s actually quite amazing how well a video about raytracing with calculators can teach you the basics of how shaders and graphics fundamentally work. Following step-by-step the actual process of building the renderer from scratch and seeing how they affect the final image really helps you understand how it works. I’ve been working with unity for almost a year now and have fairly good experience using shaders for my projects and now seeing how one works under the hood (albeit using a very different rendering technique) really gives you a sense of appreciation for these wonderful bits of code.

Great job! For sqrt(), it's easy to do using plain ints. Start with an approximate value that's 1 shifted left by half of the bits of your input number, then perform 1, 2 or 3 iterations of Raphson-Newton to get a more precise value, doing ret=(ret+x/ret)/2. You'll have to shift each intermediary result by 12 since you're using fixed point, but that can be way faster than passing by floats!

This video held my interest to the end, a pleasant surprise for what seemed like an absurd premise. It takes me back the early days of computer graphics and my first experiments with POV-ray on a 66MHz '386 when rendering an image took hours and Blender didn't exist.

I always knew that interpreters were more computationally expensive than compilers, but I never truly appreciated it until I had to write a compiler. It was a painfully simple one, but a compiler nonetheless. Honestly, we programmers are spoiled in the modern day by how much extra processing capacity we can assume will be available to the program.

This is really impressive! I'm currently taking a computer graphics course and have implemented the techniques you mentioned in my own c++ projects (like shadows and ray tracing), but I never would've thought to try rendering using a graphing calculator. Really cool idea and video!

As a musician, I was surprised by how much of these terms I've stumbled across in my audio engineering courses. This was a great video, and I learned a lot about how sound and images are related! I was thinking of writing some advanced audio processing algorithms for my Gameboy Advance, and this video definitely helped to see your approaches on optomizing the code.

Great work! It's awesome to see your projects develop! I remember most of the comments on your TI-Basic version were "why didn't you do this in ASM?" :P The transition of moving the window to the calculator screen was so smooth I though you were using a program to do it until I re-watched it!

as someone who fiddled around with TI-Basic for a total of 3 weeks I’ll pretend I understand this video

you did a great job explaining this to laymen. I've never done any programming or any kind of 3d rendering beyond making basic shapes in blender, but despite that you made it easy to understand the concepts

A very basic raytracing algorithm like this sounds really awesome to implement on a modern computer for real time raytracing that isn't RTX, maybe a certain Java game...

Banger video! Just as I'm going to sleep, you just uploaded today! Thanks The Science Elf, I'll watch this after I wake up tomorrow morning 😆 Goodnight everyone and take care! 👋

I usually watch your videos every time I come home from school, and I love em.

This is a sick example of how good software optimization improves hardware performance. Nice job!

Thanks for having detailed your experience. These kind of details is probably the most interesting aspect in such video.

I might say that it was really good for ray tracing on a TI-84 Calculator. I really enjoyed it.

i've had to write a whole raytracing program (doing about everything you mentioned) on paper for my entrance exams last year. I did fairly well on that one and enjoyed writing it a lot, even though I ultimately failed the exams. I wish I could have tried running it

Weirdly this, calculator video, of all things, clearly distilled and explained succinctly various key Raytracing terms better than most any other video I've come across. Terms that I've heard for years defined really well. Really cool. I remember programming on my ti83+ back in the late 90s. Good times.

I did not understand most of the stuff but I appreciate your efforts and am impressed with the results.

It makes my day when the science elf uploads something

Never thought I'd see a graphics calculator being used for graphics haha

Holy smokes, that Blender vs TI-84 side-by-side is beautiful. Nicely done.

This is such an excellent way to teach about the rendering concepts and process step by step. Thank you!

This was super cool! I never would’ve suspected such capability out of my calculator, but I suppose looking back on it that makes sense.

Very cool! I'm quite interested in graphics programming! I've been playing around with opengl recently.

I've been obsessed with the cx calculators since they were announced I love this video

oh my gosh!! i've been watching your stuff for a good while, since i was like 11 years old lol. good to see you're back!

this is why I want to get into programming. This stuff is so cool

I think your videos may have inspired some of my teammates in Valorant to also see what they can run on their calculators.

This was fascinating! Super well done overall!

Absolutely fantastic, I always wanted to know the power of those small calculators

Great video as always!

So cool! Gonna try out this fixed float trick =)

WAIT YOU CAME BACK??? I used to watch all of your videos religiously! Honestly really nice to see a new video.

Great Video! The LUT part made me very happy. Great that you considered that :D

Wow, very impressive results. Have you looked into using SIMD instead of/with fixed points? Like break down the 24 bit interface into 3x8bit.

love it! Even though it's ancient tech, there is something about rendering color (or even mono) images using 8/16 bit (or 24 in this case) MCUs

Incredible work man, this was really insightful.

Super impressive. I used to code games on my calculators back in the day. This is next level stuff here.

Laupok on est là !!

Dudes calculator is faster than my computer.

thats awesome progress compared to the older program! awesome video

Awesome, a little optimisation goes a long way and this is the next level. ;)

have you tried porting this program to your pc to see how fast it runs? I wonder if it could have fast enough frames per second to make a simple demo game

I'm curious how well this'd run on my TI Nspire CX CAS.

Props for using Romeo Knight's music!

This is a great video! Thank you very much for posting. I learned a lot!

For inverse square root, you can use quake 3's algo, it's a lot faster

Well you know what's next, Raytracing on a Game Boy!

Wow! I once wrote a hidden line removal 3D rendered tilting double gaussian curve on a TI-84. It took hours to plot each frame.

We missed you more than you can imagine. We’re glad you’re back

Elle Woods called. She wants her calculator back 💕

Shouldn’t Int32’s smallest number be a negative value, aka the same value as the biggest but negative? Unless you mean unsigned, that way it’d be zero (and not one, anyway)

Please make a sequel, this is one of those gems that have no reason grabbing my attention this much

Good job! These hardware accelerations would definitely make graphics heavy games more accessible to hand-held devices.

I did this with no tricks! The trick was to use C++ instead of the built in! Also I lied about the processor. But no tricks.

Now add a function to render graphs and numbers in 3d space and make all your calculator's interface run in raytraced 3d.

Great Video mate ....i always though that hardware is already mature enough and only the software needs to be worked on....and you proved me right😁

This content is amazing! Why can’t I like a video more than once :)

Is it just me or does 3:30 look distinctly Microsoft?

When a _calculator_ that's likely thousands of times less powerful as a mid-range (of the time) GPU, but costs the same amount (at the time), you're either getting a really good deal on the GPU or are being oversold the calculator.

Gold channel. Can't wait to watch every other video

Nice! Fun vid and really cool concept, keep it up!

But can it run doom?

Cool! Now do path tracing.

surprisingly entertaining, I do 3D rendering professionally and seeing this on a calculator is mind blowing

was literally doing my c++ homework trying to remember and understand fixed points for the program im wringing but distracted myself with your video and you made me understand float points and fixed points better than my professor has done for the past three weeks

With the scarcity in GPUs nowadays, looks like I will be booting up my games on a TI-84 😂

ceut qui sont fr et qui vienne de laupok lever la main

Not sure how I got recommended this video but wow that is super impressive man!

Hey dude, loved this video, so cool. I'm a bit older than you (not sure how much, but im almost 40) and back in high school, having a TI loaded with games and stuff was pretty much one of the coolest things you could have. Back then, cell phones were very rare, and the games on them sucked for the most part. You also ran the risk of having your phone confiscated (you weren't supposed to have them in class) but that was rare. Because you needed your TI for Math class though, they were not able to be confiscated, and if you weren't obvious, you could play games in your math class all day. I remember programming in basic and wanting to do ASM, but it was too hard for me at the time (much different environment and times). That said though, TI calcs have a very soft spot in my heart, and I love seeing how far you guys have taken them. If you would have told me back in my high school years that something like this would eventually come out, I wouldn't have believed ya! Again, great video to see, loved it.

Two uploads in less than 1 month time Very impressive Is this going to become a regular thing

Qui est là grâce à laupok???

it's good to see your back making RU-vid videos

Just commenting so you get more views! Awesome video man, wish I had the time and strength needed

He can code an entire raytraced engine but still can’t figure out how to upgrade from Blender 2.79.

An 2nd upload before a year has passed? Has the Elf truly returned to us!?

There is a renderer for blender that implements similar techniques that you described, called POV-Ray. This scene with radiance would take a few seconds to render on my computer, although kudos for achieving the same thing on a calculator in minutes!

dev since doing asm z80 on my ti 83/84, did a raytracer, so let's say I'm loving the content!

This is amazing! Clocked in at 8min and 48secs on my Ti-84 Plus CE-T Python ed, using FASTER for a slight overclock and resetting the entire thing beforehand to get rid of old junk. Looking forward to what you'll do with this project, maybe allow for custom scenes to be added?

Cool explanation, I'm subscribed :)

absolutely powerful. it almost justifies the extortionate prices they sell these calculators for!!!

Videos like this are fascinating ❤ I've no programming, coding, and barely math literate(jk), but I still GET it. I saw one earlier about ray tracing on a zx spectrum with only 15 colors 😮

My man made Enscape for ti calc ! Neat mate :)

Groovy processor! I love the Mac OS 7 cat wallpaper 😆

This is some impressive results!

I think a neat addition would be to add 'passes' similar to how modern raytracers work, where the image starts noisy - but recognizable - and slowly becomes clearer and better, rather than doing the entire thing at once on a row by row basis. The biggest benefit being that it allows for quick drafting of what the scene will look like, and letting you move the camera around and reposition without having to wait for the final product