RTPU: The Next Step in Graphics Rendering
Move over GPU... literally, move over, as the RTPU is the next step up on the technology ladder, bringing added photo-realism to gaming and other graphics-intensive applications without the huge processing load.
It feels like centuries since id Software's first-person shooter Quake required a math co-processor. Soon after the game's release, 3DFX launched the first-ever dedicated GPU, revolutionizing gaming visuals by turning pixelated polygons into smooth, three-dimensional shapes that appeared more realistic than ever. When Agia introduced the PhysX processor after the turn of the century, the visuals took on more of a realistic appearance by introducing physics, depicting the natural movements of objects, and how they interact with the environment. Now Caustic Graphics wants to take the next step into providing the ultimate experience with its dedicated ray-tracing processing system, the CausticRT. 
The new system's CausticOne ray-tracing processing unit(RTPU) isn't meant to replace the GPU. In fact, it's job is to enhance the graphics much like Agia's PhysX, however the CausticOne doesn't deal with physics in terms of movement, but rather where the incoherent light rays scatter in a particular scene. Typically, ray-tracing requires that the PC or Mac process the entire scene, not just the visible areas, eating up valuable memory and CPU processing. This usually takes a large chunk of time on a single machine, especially when rendering high-resolution scenes in programs like 3DS Max and Maya. In fact, Pixar and other CGI companies have dedicated "farms" in order to render those realistic movies in an acceptable timeframe. According to the company, the average render time today for a single ray-traced image at film resolution is over three hours.
However, the CausticRT system supposedly removes the immediate bulk of the ray-tracing calculations off the GPU and CPU, using what the company calls a "breakthrough algorithm" that addresses the rendering issue and organizes the incoherent rays into a data flow. Thus, the processor sends the ordered data to the GPU and CPU. Ultimately, the CausticRT system will render ray-traced scenery with rasterization-like efficiency, producing photo-realistic graphics 20 times faster than anything on the market today.
"CausticRT does not displace a GPU or CPU in a graphics system, rather it acts as a co-processor that traces rays and schedules the results in a manner that allows GPUs or CPUs to shade them as efficiently as they do with rasterization," said James McCombe, co-founder and CTO of Caustic Graphics. "We are working with an emerging developer community to create new or port their existing renderers and applications to Caustic so artists and designers can take advantage of the photorealism and visual effects that make ray-tracing so compelling over rasterization."
Unfortunately, the CausticRT platform isn't ready for the general public, costing around $4,000 for the CausticGL driver, the CausticOne processor and accelerator card, and one year of firmware and software updates. The company also said that developers may also purchase a one-year subscription for US $2,500 that includes support for up to 10 incidents. However, it may be possible that the general public will see the CausticRT platform in the not-too-distant-future, as the company suggested that game consoles could achieve film-quality run-time visuals using the system. Could this processor be included in the next generation of Xbox and PlayStation consoles? Perhaps so. And like Agia, it may be possible that the CausticRT system will become a part of the Nvidia--or AMD for that matter--collective.
Stay tuned for the official announcement of the CausticOne accelerator card this Wednesday.
- Ray ,
- Tracing ,
- Processing ,
- Unit
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"Typically, ray-tracing requires that the PC or Mac process the entire scene, not just the visible areas"
I got lost when you said "PC or Mac", which made about as much sense to me as drinking "Soda or Pepsi".
it won't do anything if the games aren't programmed for it...
so its just a giant money sucker paperweight until the game devs stop sitting on their asses making the same game with a new game...
the software is well behind the hardware in the present
Yes and in 5 years we will have a CPU with RT, and GPU in its die?
How many cores can we shove? lol.
meant to be "same game with a new name..."
sorry toms doesn't have a edit feature... not much i can do about that feature though
Well, let's hope it will be affordable sometime soon. Of course they will need some support from a company with deep pockets and a product line it possibly supports (all the usual suspects ... AMD, nVidia, even intel though the latter may try to compete with Larrabee). On the other hand, the majority of PC gamers is frugal and high-tech extensions for several hundred bucks are strictly for enthusiasts (or a small percentage and market).
Yeah, I thought the "future" was moving the gpu onto the cpu core and eliminating the graphics card, not creating new cards.
This seems a little out of sync with where the industry is going.
I like the idea of having say a 16 core processor, and four cores are running graphics, 8 running 16 threads, and the other four cores are dedicated to sound, physics, raid, and networking. Or something like that..
But can it run Crysis?
I read about these guys here about a month ago? It seems they have lost some venture capital or something to have such steep pricing for what really amounts to a research and developement franchise. It will be welcome to have these guys absorbed into the Intel/nVidia/AMD embrella, because I seriously doubt they have the ability to take this venture out to the full spectrum of the public. Maybe Microsoft will be in line to buy them as well, as I think they are invested into ray-tracing.
I just typed out a huge explanation and a bit of insight for this tech, but the useless toms site and it's terrible support for anything internet explorer just erased the whole thing. So screw it. Meh.
it won't do anything if the games aren't programmed for it...so its just a giant money sucker paperweight until the game devs stop sitting on their asses making the same game with a new game...the software is well behind the hardware in the present
Isn't that the same argument as PhysX? But if this goes the way that did, it could become ubiquitous on video cards in the future, making it worthwhile to program for, making it worth having on the cards.
This isn't for gaming, it's for rendering. Think Hollywood, or commercials, or promotional videos.
amd/ATI shuld try to aquire this.
another core in the computer?
Having a 100W CPU, and a 200W graphics card is already pretty heavy.
I wonder how much power this chip will need.. Soon we'll have to buy 1000W PSU's for just a home pc?
I would be excited if it didn't cost $4000.
ok...AMD/ATI already screwed up once with Physx and let it go saying that it was worthless. They need to swoop in and purchase this before Nvidia gets out the checkbook and adds this to their lineup.
So were 3d graphics in general not too long ago. This seems to be just another piece in the puzzle for offloading CPU tasks. I'm all for offloading things from the CPU (regardless of cores/clock).
By the time the graphics, physics, and "lighting" are offloaded, the bulk of the CPU can be dedicated to much more complex AI and other core gaming bits (all that stuff behind the pretty pictures like, team-speak, movement calculations, and such).
But can it run Crysis?
I was gonna throw in the same comment. I knew it would be asked
I was gonna throw in the same comment. I knew it would be asked
I better it will still stutter with AA turned on.
it won't do anything if the games aren't programmed for it...so its just a giant money sucker paperweight until the game devs stop sitting on their asses making the same game with a new game...the software is well behind the hardware in the present
Obviously, you don't run FSX, Crysis, or HD video editing software.
This isn't for gaming, it's for rendering. Think Hollywood, or commercials, or promotional videos.
That maybe true but maybe some version for helping rendering in games will come out if the gpu company acquire this technology.. $4000 is fair enough for CG makers... wait till it hits mass production... then the prices would lower down... maybe put Radeon 4870 in crossfire and pop in this as the third would help running Crysis...
i think this would be the same as Physix, Cuda or ATI's avivo hope AMD gets the first dip tho... looking at how much Nvidia's marketing use the Physix and Cuda to sell their product, ATI would be at lose if they have nothing to bounce back...
The CausticOne is a board built using FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) and 4GB of RAM. Two of the FPGAs (the ones with heatsinks on them) make up SIMD processing units that handle evaluation of rays. We are told that the hardware provides about a 20x speedup over modern CPU based raytracing algorithms. And since this hardware can be combined with CPU based raytracing techniques, this extra speed is added on top of the speed current rendering systems already have. Potentially, we could integrate processing with CausticOne into GPU based raytracing techniques, but this has not yet been achieved. Certainly, if a single PC could make use of CPU, GPU and raytracing processor, we would see some incredible performance. - Anandtech
So... yeah... one day it could move to consumer group alongside current gpu...
But can it run Crysis?
Don't negative rate that man..., you guys are just jealous you didn't post it first!! LOL! I want a "...but can it run Crysis" T-shirt!!!!
Those scenes don't look like a hollywood movie... so who cares if you can do it at 4 frames per second. Mediocre is still mediocre even if done quickly.
Very promising looking board they have.
One nice thing about true raytracing is has almost an infinite number polygons when it comes to making smooth surfaces -- thus why pixar's movies look so great.
Wow this is kind of a break through and yes it will be used in games eventually. But before this it was years down the road because of the high cost. Intel used 24 cores (quad socket 6 core processors @ 2.66Ghz) to produce their quake wars demo with ray-tracing. With this card they maybe able to down size to a single octo core machine. It would be really interesting if AMD picked this up their complete platform could actually come about. I also wonder if this is that larrabee ace in the hole?
This would also be nice for nvidia just contiuning their lead in the discrete graphics card market.
But i assure we will see this company pop up again real soon with something big
You would not do hollywood rendering at 4fps. You would rendering 1 frame can take hours, this could theoretically shorten that to minutes. It's not a frame of a game, it's one frame of film.
This link will explain further what it does.
Essentially they will be focusing on developers and render farms. Attempting to cut down the hours of rendering that computers at these places do. The faster they can produce something the better as time is money, and the more effort they can put into making each frame look better.
almost an infinite number
Now there's a brilliant oximoron if ever I saw one.
No number is so big that you "may as well call it infinite", that's the whole point of infinite. If it had an infinite number of polygons it would take an infinite amount of time to render.
Promising, but still hot air at the moment, these things are way above the consumer level, if you think Cry-games are photorealistic think again. Hopefully Caucus ends up as another Ageia but for the Ray Tracing part, so we have some 'additional' incentives to upgrade our NVidia Inside, sorry ATI, your 3Dfx-esque comment on GPGPU snubs yourself.
The fact that it's called "Caustic" should tell you it's not for games (caustics are the properties of light to bounce within an object, like a bottle, or a diamond). I doubt we're going to see games with caustics in the next 10 years.
Innovation is always good on my book but only when it gets an endorsement from a graphics industry corporation will it be pushed to mainstream.
This added realism sounds very nice but right now the game industry needs good games instead of more realism I think.
Considering the image with what appears to be two processors and some other circuitry being cooled like this, I'm guessing this comes close to the 75W power limit of the pcie connector. So it's not all that likely that it'll be implemented on a gpu's board directly until the die's shrunk to those 28nm amd was dreaming about the other day. But I suppose none of the big players want to buy the company just yet, waiting until it's proven that it works. It may very well be worth the 4K if the performance increase is genuine though. I'm sure a dreamworks farm is expensive to run, and if a sub 75W item can improve the performance by just 25% of what is claimed, it's investment might still cost less than the savings in processing time/power draw