In early July we shared the experiments of YouTube user S0lly with Microsoft Excel, which included a graphics engine and several 3D models. Now, what is the limit? What more can be done visually with a spreadsheet? Recently, S0lly raised the stakes with a ray tracing demo, the same star Nvidia tries to sell in its RTX cards. It is not the fastest thing in the world, but the fact that it works is already impressive.
The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, insists that it would be "a true madness" to buy a graphics card today without ray tracing support. Unfortunately, the huge performance loss and poor implementation we have seen in the handful of compatible games are far from the original demos. It is possible that time will prove him right, but there are many users out there who want to enjoy the latest games now without destroying their budgets, so ray tracing is not a priority.
Furthermore, ray tracing has become a kind of meme (search for images with the RTX OFF / RTX ON caption), and a couple of days ago, this 'celebration' of one of Nvidia's most superficial features reached a new level thanks to user S0lly, resident sorcerer of Microsoft Excel who shares his strange adventures on YouTube. Here is what he did last:
Ray tracing in Excel
That's right, after the graphics engine and the 3D models, now comes ray tracing in Excel. This development, which he considers 'basic', is based on the book The Ray Tracer Challenge by Jamis Buck, although some concepts had to be left out because Excel simply cannot handle them.
If you want to try it on your computer, the first step is to download the sheet from GitHub. Once opened in Excel, you should copy the content of row 24 and reproduce it in rows 25-14405. This will take some time depending on the firepower of your computer.
https://old.neoteo.com/project-scarlett-nueva-consola-de-microsoft/Finally, you can press Play to navigate the environment with your keyboard (full list of commands on GitHub), or use the Animate button to have the camera follow a predefined path. Either way, you will need to arm yourself with patience. The video shows a very accelerated session, since performance is about 0.5 FPS. The public is already asking for Doom inside Excel. Will it be possible...?
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