http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/ Engadget Comments for http://www.engadget.com/media/feedlogo.gif http://www.engadget.com en-us Copyright 2012 Weblogs, Inc. The contents of this feed are available for non-commercial use only. Blogsmith http://www.blogsmith.com/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 9:25AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
PhysX is a physics supplement that offloads physics, not graphics, calculations from the CPU.

This is an entirely different type of rendering from current GPUs though. A game's engine would have to be created from the ground up to utilize ray tracing.]]>Apr 20th 2009 9:35AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 9:36AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=694]]>Apr 20th 2009 9:57AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 10:18AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
I'm sure it's technically impressive but whatever the framerate, that demo looks horrible, and I say that as a Wii owner. :)

]]>Apr 20th 2009 10:24AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 2:57PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
NEWSFLASH: Renderman sucks at raytracing.

Man! And I thought I was at a geeky tech site. Get your facts together next time...]]>Apr 20th 2009 6:20PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 6:26PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
That demo reminded me of the AWESOME CG in early playstation/saturn/pc games.]]>Apr 20th 2009 11:20PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 21st 2009 3:25AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 9:33AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Yea, maybe in 1997. The tricks video games are pulling off these days using existing real time rendering solutions often rival ray tracing. Realtime AO (like SSAO) and GI are more realistic goals in my opinion.]]>Apr 20th 2009 10:09AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
In all seriousness, I can see big benefits to this - I just hope it's integrated well and that the fact it's so different from traditional computer game graphics doesn't make it useless to developers.]]>Apr 20th 2009 10:32AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
"The tricks video games are pulling off these days using existing real time rendering solutions often rival ray tracing..."

That's just it- they're "tricks". They rely on hacks like programmable shaders and complicated culling algorithms (BSP etc) just to keep things fast enough. The reflections and refractions we see in games are generated using environment mapping either a pre-rendered or realtime cubemap, and the effects fall apart. Shadows are kludgey- regardless whether we use shadow maps or z-buffered/volume-based algorithms- they still suck.

Ray tracing algorithms are simple and easy to optimize and embarrassingly parallelizable and they attempt to mimic actual light. Combining raytracing with radiosity (likely in later gen hardware) renders worlds indistinguishable from real life. And new features recently added to GPUs are still almost trivial to do in a ray-traced scene. Realistic shadows, reflections/refractions, displacement mapping, etc don't create as much a performance hit as they do in rasterization.

There are always downsides, which I think will be solved by making future rendering techniques a hybrid between rasterization and raytracing (similar to how professional scanline renderers work today).]]>Apr 20th 2009 11:05AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 11:23AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 11:36AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
Sure, you can throw another gig of memory on the graphics card, but then game designers will add 1.5 gigs of detailed models with high rez textures. It's a losing battle because ray tracing puts the full brunt of the most inflationary part of software squarely on one of the most expensive parts of hardware.

On the other side of the equation, rasterization, even with fancy shadow calculation, scales much more nicely, and all those 'tricks' are easy to pipeline, and don't compound as badly or inflate as quickly. You just get a much higher rate of return investing in better tricks than trying to brute-force the problem with ray-tracing.]]>Apr 20th 2009 1:23PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
You've missed the point of dedicated raytracing hardware then.

Rasterization is easy to pipeline? Wha?!?! There are many, many stages in the traditional graphics pipeline that are blocking. For an idea, break the modeling setup apart, you'll realize that geometry processing needs to be finished prior to vertex transformations. Vertex transforms block lighting. And so forth. Yes, each vertex transform and fragment program can be parallelized, but the entire pipeline cannot. Frankly, I'm amazed that GPU manufacturers managed to work out most of the kinks in multithreaded rendering contexts, but there are still limitations.

In raytracing, each ray can run on separate thread. Not counting redundancies (which can be optimized), these can be performed simultaneously. Also, at least in eye-casting applications, we get to remove clipping/frustum culling and visibility optimizations (what isn't seen is no longer drawn, which isn't always the case in rasterization).

Btw, Rasterization scales linearly (O(n)) for the number of polygons in the scene. In raytracing, growth is linear as well, but static structures can be optimized into k-d trees for logarithmic growth.]]>Apr 20th 2009 2:55PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/"renders worlds indistinguishable from real life"

If I got a penny every time I heard that will be 'next' I'd have enough to buy several of these raytracer cards.
]]>Apr 21st 2009 1:25AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 9:34AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 10:36AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
Now, if they can just pull off some real time radiosity too...]]>Apr 20th 2009 9:40AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 9:46AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 10:25AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 9:50AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 11:07PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 9:52AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 10:22AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 10:35AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 10:45AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
There's a feature for the PS4.]]>Apr 20th 2009 9:57AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
What's random about rays? They travel in straight lines.]]>Apr 20th 2009 9:57AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 10:15AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 11:09AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/It really depends on what raytracing/pathtracing approach is taken. ]]>Apr 20th 2009 12:30PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
Randomization is how you avoid aliasing.]]>Apr 20th 2009 3:51PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
The 90's called, they want their heatsinks back.]]>Apr 20th 2009 10:00AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
Sorry if I sound jaded. But if you look at what Intel is doing with their processor line it proves that they learned the lesson that packing more Mhz into something isn't always the best thing to do. Intel and the Core series is doing more with less power. It would be nice if ATI and Nvidia would take a break from the arms race and think about how to do graphics hardware going forward. Instead we will continue to see graphics cards grow hungrier and hungrier, eventually needing their own power supply. . . oh wait that already has happened.]]>Apr 20th 2009 10:40AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/what? where have you been for the past year? ATI has done the exact same thing as Intel with the 48xx series, drawing more efficiency out of their designs and targeting the mainstream instead of the hardcore.]]>Apr 20th 2009 11:59AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
Hence why they would love for it to catch on so that they can release a commercial card running in the GHZ.

Get it up to 3ghz like a modern CPU and put 4 cores of that on a card and you're looking at a rediculously fast raytracer.

If they had NVIDIA's access to fab technology then they would have a use for a nice big loud fan.]]>Apr 20th 2009 3:51PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 21st 2009 12:50AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/ATI is NOT doing a good job of making their GPUs more efficient right now.
If you compare nv and ATIs flagship cards (the GTX295 and the 4870x2), the ATI card consumes far more power and generates much more heat than the nvidia one (and generally for slightly less performance). ATI seems to be taking the route Intel took with the P4 ("crank up the frequencies, to hell with the increased power consumption and heat!") at the moment.]]>Apr 21st 2009 9:51AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Normal raster based GPU's will be much faster, and much cheaper. So until they can make this run most games as fast as a GPU, and at most within a 10% higher price, then at most Pixar n co will buy these to get a vague look at their work in real-time.
Sure ray-tracing look's pretty, but that video was some water, which Dx10 made water look kinda nice. Show me (oh this is so cliched) Crysis running Ray-traced at a decent speed. Cos even a normal GPU can do 2 car's n a pond.]]>Apr 20th 2009 10:03AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 10:25AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/I can knock out HD-quality render's of simple object's at about 12fps, and that's CPU based. So currently this tech isn't selling me. The dream of Ray-Traced real-time render's is a nice one, but beyond tying it to a Quadro for 3D film work I personally don't see any future in this. especially in gaming. Give it a decade or so n GPU may hit a wall like the CPU did in the ghz race, but until then GPU's are cheaper, faster and good enough.]]>Apr 20th 2009 10:35AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
Well, anyway, I certainly don't wish fail on these guys, but I don't expect them to set the world on fire either. Ray tracing might become a standard (as the GPU people need to have Something to sell as 'the next big thing'), but it won't have really been necessary.]]>Apr 20th 2009 10:49AMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
Please read the article instead of speculating and spreading fud.]]>Apr 20th 2009 1:03PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/Apr 20th 2009 1:06PMhttp://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/20/get-ready-for-another-co-processor-further-details-on-caustic-g/
Why, given that ray tracing gives you pretty much all "realistic" effects for free, are they demoing a dull grey landscape with a couple of cars? It's not exactly a mind blowing demo, especially given what people like intel were demoing a couple of years back on distinctly less specialised hardware.]]>Apr 20th 2009 3:54PM