Caustic Graphics develops ray tracing at gaming speeds
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted March 13th 2009 12:57PM
posted March 13th 2009 12:57PM
The ray-tracing technique for generating 3D images is an extremely processor-intensive proposition that doesn't lend itself to gaming (or real-time anything, for that matter), but all of that may be about to change. Caustic Graphics, a San Francisco-based start-up founded by former Apple employee James McCombe, claims that its dedicated ray tracing card will produce photorealistic graphics at a rate 20 times faster than products currently available. And if that weren't enough, their new CausticRT platform has the potential to perform the operations a whopping 200 times faster -- possibly fast enough for a photorealistic gaming platform. The second generation technology should be unleashed sometime in mid-2010, while the CausticOne card will get its official announcement on April 23 of this year.
[Via Business 2.0 Press]
[Via Business 2.0 Press]
200x isn't anywhere close to what gaming will need. Don't get too excited.
And - what's more important is - your mileage will vary. 200x is probably under controlled demo environments.
Does it play Doom??? if it does, how play players can it render simultaneously???
Amazing, and revolutionary, if true.
HOWEVER - I thought the industry learned it's lesson when all the following dedicated singular-purpose expansion processors failed: a) X-Fi (thinking of X-RAM here), b) Ageia (before they got swallowed by nVidia, c) AISeek Intia (artificial intelligence)
Chicken and egg problem - developers won't develop for the card if no one has the card, and consumers won't buy the card if there are no games for it.
I think your right, thats why the best choice is for them to partner themselves to a major company and intergrate their technology with current cards.
True and maybe this will be a epic fail on the commercial point of view, but it might become just a feature of a new generation of "GPU" which would implement traditional GPUs with this kind of architecture, all-in-one.
My question is, why in hell is it based on OpenGL? If you want speed, you use anything (ANYTHING) but OpenGL.
Are you an idiot?
That's a serious question. OpenGL is not and never has been slow.
Telanis.... I don't know what to say. Let's just leave it at "fail" (I'm being nice even).
If you want to correct answer: OpenGL allows companies to write extensions (Direct3D doesn't because microsoft wants a standard interface, not a bunch of different styles used by a bunch of different companies)
My favorite comments are the ones where people who have no clue what they are talking about are so sure of themselves.
Well anything but OpenGL is direct3D...
And you are not gonna build a new technology based on Direct3D, because you would be limited by the possibilities of Direct3D, whereas OpenGL is Open source so you basically can improve it up to your needs.
Where are the god damned demo videos?
weird, on the website, they have a pic of a locomotive, taken from
http://www.3dlinks.com/gallery_fullview.cfm?id=4134
that was posted in 2002.
I thought that pic looked familiar...
soon this company will be acquired by NVIDIA or ATI. much like physix....
Can't wait for 3d apps to take advantage of this.
I for one found the whole realtime raytracing for games kinda pointless, since I never found the lack of realism in game came from lack of reflection(I really thought they did pretty good in that), which is exactly what raytrace is good at, but the lack of indirect illumination, which is the essential reason for 3d to look 3d. Anyone who used a 3d app, or has some basic traditional art training should know that it is the complexity of ambiant lighting that gives everyday objects volume for them to look realistic, but what raytrace gives you are mainly glossy reflection or refrection, which is hardly the point. Currently 3d software use photon tracing, final gathering or ambiant occlusion to get indirect illumination, but none of them doesn't require massive amount of precomputed data and assuming a static scene. Anyone solve that would be the time to get really excited.