raytracing
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NVIDIA Fermi / GF100 architectural details revealed
Fermi hardware might still be two months away, but NVIDIA has done the sage thing and released some tantalizing numbers and architectural details to keep the fanboys chirping in the meantime. The GF100 will signal the end of tiresome rebadging and clock speed massaging, and early adopters will find 512 CUDA cores, 48 ROPs, and a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface sprawled across three billion transistors. Big changes are also afoot in how the card will do its work, with a reorganization toward a more parallel workflow leading to promises of up to eight times better geometry performance than on the GT200. HardOCP reports that anti-aliasing results have improved "notably," while the video we've got stashed after the break for you shows the GF100 beating the GTX 285 handily in a Far Cry 2 benchmark. Still, the PC Perspective crew expressed some apprehension about the massive die size and how it could impact yields given the still young 40nm production process -- a sentiment echoed by other publications who questioned whether NVIDIA would not have been better off trying for a less ambitious, more gaming-oriented board. We should all know that answer soon enough. Read - AnandTech Read - Hot Hardware Read - PC Perspective Read - HardOCP Read - Tom's Hardware
Get ready for another co-processor: further details on Caustic Graphics's RTPU
Ray tracing is the current holy grail of gaming graphics, the rendering technique that might finally make the licensed game based on Pixar's latest look as good as the film itself. But, the typically random nature of rays has made rendering them on traditional hardware inefficient, a problem Caustic Graphics claimed to have solved, and is now backing that up by giving PC Perspective some further details and demos. The company's tech will rely on a new graphics co-processor called the Ray Tracing Processing Unit (RTPU), working in concert with existing 3-D accelerators to deliver rays at frame rates high enough for interactive applications. How high? Early hardware dubbed CausticOne (that giant slab of silicon above) manages 3 - 5 frames-per-second in the demonstration video after the break. That's not nearly enough for twitchy first-person shooters, but second-gen hardware due next year is looking to deliver 14 times that -- plenty to get your high-reflectivity frag on.
Caustic Graphics develops ray tracing at gaming speeds
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]
Intel: Some example of Ray Traced gaming likely in 2-3 years
Already looking to the future, Intel's Dr. Michael Vollmer expressed hope towards the future of ray traced visuals in gaming. When asked by PC Gaming Hardware if there were developers already working on ray traced games, Vollmer said, "I dare say that in two to three years time we will see something," noting that he keeps in touch with companies all over the world.Ray tracing is a graphics technique that is capable of some impressive, photorealistic visuals but conversely is very computational-intensive. Vollmer also said that the raytracing demo shown last month should be seen as a technical demo and that the graphics portion had been taken from the non-raytraced optimized Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Speaking of which, we couldn't think of a more likely candidate for showcasing raytraced graphics than John Carmack and Id Software, except maybe Crytek. If Vollmer's estimates are accurate, we hope to see some ray traced frag fest in time for the 2011 Game Developers Conference.[Via Blue's News]
NVIDIA gobbles up ray tracing software maker RayScale
Details are pretty slim on this one at the moment, but PC Perspective is reporting that NVIDIA has snapped up the Utah-based start-up RayScale, a maker of ray tracing software. As PC Perspective points out, the move is made particularly interesting in light of some recent comments made by NVIDIA CTO David Kirk, who mused about the merging of ray tracing and rasterization into a "hybrid renderer" of sorts, but didn't offer any firm details on the company's plans at the time. No word on a price tag for the acquisition just yet, or any other details for that matter, but it seems like things should be getting a bit more official in the next few days.
