Caustic Promises 200x Boost in Raytracing by 2010
Caustic Graphics, a small startup out of San Francisco, is promising exponentially faster raytracing as early as next year. Founded by a group of former Apple engineers, the new company is touting its CausticOne graphics accelerator card as the solution to the sluggish raytracing techniques currently available.![]()
For years, the rendering option of choice for the gaming industry has been rasterization. Raytracing is a wholly different approach, which holds promise for more realistic graphics. The trade off with raytracing is that it requires much more processing muscle than rasterization.
Intel has been one company behind raytracing, but its demos are completely reliant on the current CPU/GPU setup. The tech giant's position on raytracing is that its CPUs can handle raytracing while also handling other general purpose duties. Caustic says its CausticOne card can give a 20x speed boost to raytracing, and "uses a host of new raytracing technology and algorithms to off-load raytracing calculations and prepare data for your GPU/CPU." By the end of 2010, the company claims that number will be up to 200x.
On the software side of things, CausticGL is a new API based on OpenGL that includes raytracing extensions, allowing for such techniques to be readily available to game designers.
While Caustic will be ready with its hardware and software sometime next year, the question is will the masses be ready for such an add-in card? In order for the tech to catch on, it will need adoption by both consumers and most game developers (or at least the big ones). Plus, with high end gaming PCs already costing an arm and a leg, the addition of a $xxx Caustic card may not be seen as a prudent investment by some. PhysX tried the add-in card approach for game physics, but the technology never caught on until the company was bought by Nvidia and the technology was integrated in the company's graphics cards.
While raytracing gives games a fresh look, and is indeed promising, rasterization is by no means looking old. Sure, Quake 4 may look good with raytracing, but it may take another couple of years for the technology to catch on.
or even better, have parts of the e card integrated into a GPU
As all our components get faster we step closer to the power unleashed by ray tracing and the level of detail and realism it can provide in many applications from image manipulation to movie production and gaming especially
As all our components get faster we step closer to the power unleashed by ray tracing and the level of detail and realism it can provide in many applications from image manipulation to movie production and gaming especially
Would you buy a Dell-design GPU? Or a Microsoft-developed CPU?
As far as computer hardware is concerned Apple engineering seems like kind of a joke. All that Apple does for computers is make an OS to load into existing equipment made by hardware companies (Intel, nVidia, etc). Apple doesn't even manufacture the iPod, that's at least assembled by HP, and I wouldn't be surprized if they designed the hardware too, and Apple just made a pretty mobile OS to run the device.
You need to read a little more. Your entire post is a waste of time.
ray tracing generates very realistic lighting. Rendering techniques such as global illumination, final gathering, sub surface scattering, caustics, all are products of ray tracing.
I disagree.
If 2 cards were placed in a pc would it be twice as fast?
That's a silly question, it would all depend machine. Intel had a machine that was running Quake 4 using real time raytracing.
This is a good example of the effects of raytracing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKqZKXwop5E
raytraced:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=121&t=654983
not raytraced:
http://www.wiinewsdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/tomb-raider-anniversary-artwork.png
I remember back in elementry school hearing about this....20 years ago and I was astounded that it wasn't a real picture. Sucks it's taken this long.
I'll bet money we'll see it next generation. The PS3 can already do real time ray tracing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8&feature=related
This video is a bit of overkill, as the model is extremely high poly ("75x more complex then those used in today's games" according to the description) and they're 4x multi-sampling the image.
Intel already has a system that can do real time raytracing aswell:
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-37925-113.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLte5f34ya8
Just being realistic.