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ART VPS Ltd have been doing PCI raytracing cards for a couple of years now. I work at a post production facility and we were evaluating them two years ago. The cards are quite neat and the software takes RenderMan files as input. There were some things they were very good at - refraction, motion blurred shadows and the like that 'just worked' when compared to RenderMan. However, they didn't support RiCurve primitives or some of the RiProcedural stuff at the time (IIRC) which were were using heavily, so they turned out not to be practical for us although it's quite possible they've fixed that now. Neat stuff.

I do work with an animation company, and a couple of these bad boys would seriously speed up our render times.

No, probably not. But one of these bad boys would.

It's odd that they think that this is news considering that Advanced Rendering Technology were building 3D ray tracing hardware a decade ago.

ART, OGL assisted, now gelato.

Do you mean this ART? Is their stuff any good? I went to a lecture given by one of their tech guys a long time ago and it sounded pretty impressive.

Have you looked at RenderDrive? The company that my wife works bought one of these recently. The guy that uses it loves it. It does the job much quicker.

It's a general pupose computer that has special hardware that is used to do the rendering. The OS is linux. In order to get it on the newtork you setup a floppy with your config file. There's a plug-in for your system that is used to do the rendering on he computer.

Direct3D STILL sucks for scientific visualisation (still favours texture pushing over high-poly-count), and is STILL Windoze-only (Wine excepted). OpenGL sucks less, and is not bound to C++ (Well, o.k. DirectX is theoretically COM, but I defy you to program it seriously in anything other than MS-bastardised C++)

Scientists tend to use grown-up OSes (i.e. no Windoze) and code in Fortran 95 or HPF, pure C or occasionally Lisp - all languages with OpenGL bindings.

You can learn OpenGL+SDL basics in an afternoon, and have flocks of teapots flying across your screen the following morning. Just beginning to learn DirectX and Direct3D means taking on board all the bizarro-world Microsoftian "C++" and COM cruft.

OpenGL's going to be around for some time.

Now, it is inappropriate for hardware raytracing cards, but us people in the scientific graphics community (and movie-making-community) are only getting to play with them now, don't expect them to trickle down to the gaming market for a while yet.

ART produce RenderDrive, a network rendering appliance, and PCI render processing card to run in your MAX/Maya workstation. Their whole business is render-optimized processing.

Anyone have any experience with these? Is this middleground this thread's looking for - high quality, quick and (relatively) cheap - between render farms and GPUs? Are GPUs a better price/utility tradeoff?

(I attended a lecture by the founder of ART a few years ago - their technology looked staggeringly impressive back then.)

There is a company which makes a dedicated rendering card. Not quite what you are talking about, but certainly faster than an all software solution.

ART make raytracing chips for the industry - convince them to target consumers, too?