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New Graphics Firm Promises Real-Time Ray Tracing
arcticstoat writes "A new graphics company called Caustic Graphics reckons it's uncovered the secret of real-time ray tracing with a chip that 'enables your CPU/GPU to shade with rasterization-like efficiency.' The new chip basically off-loads ray tracing calculations and then sends the data to your GPU and CPU, enabling your PC to shade a ray-traced scene much more quickly. Caustic's management team isn't afraid to rubbish the efforts of other graphics companies when it comes to ray tracing. 'Some technology vendors claim to have solved the accelerated ray tracing problem by using traditional algorithms along with GPU hardware,' says Caustic. However, the company adds that 'if you've ever seen them demo their solutions you'll notice that while results may be fast — the image quality is underwhelming, far below the quality that ray tracing is known for.' According to Caustic, this is because the advanced shading and lighting effects usually seen in ray-traced scenes, such as caustics and refraction, can't be accelerated on a standard GPU because it can't process incoherent rays in hardware. Conversely, Caustic claims that the CausticOne 'thrives in incoherent ray tracing situations: encouraging the use of multiple secondary rays per pixel.' The company is also introducing its own API, called CausticGL, which is based on OpenGL/GLSL, which will feature Caustic's unique ray tracing extensions."
wow i cant wait for this. assuming that it's easily fits into current hardware
They are performing the ray tracing one scanline at a time.
Being a 3D artist (mostly just a modeler and texture artist, but sometimes a generalist), I'm happy to see work like this being done. It seems like only yesterday I was waiting hours or all night for simple ray traced scenes.
While it may be underwhelming to some, I'm more than happy to see people working on this kind of tech. Sure, we've moved on from just "simple" ray tracing to using things like GI, etc, but in time we'll have that in real time as well. Some apps are already doing some tricks to enable real time GI and other tricks. (the key word being tricks, since they're not totally physically accurate). Obviously real time will always lag behind, but I look forward to the future.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
2009 is the year of the ray traced desktop.
You can't take the sky from me.
Stop copying and pasting the article to generate almost the entire summary, especially when you don't do it right. The However, the company adds that 'if you've ever seen them demo their solutions you'll notice that while results may be fast -- the image quality is underwhelming, far below the quality that ray tracing is known for.' makes it look like you're talking about the Image quality of Caustic's new solution, which is obviously wrong. Here's the real paragraph:
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do they get their chips from Flammable Systems, and their capacitors from Toxic Components Inc?
Table-ized A.I.
"Caustic" Graphics? Would you want to do business with a video company that names itself after a chemical that damages your eyes?
They've advertised Linux support too, but I haven't heard anything from these guys. Unless they're like nVidia and sit around killing kittens all day, it would be a good idea for them to actually do some research and figure out how GLX and DRI work. Even the ATI closed-source drivers still respect the GLX way of life.
(nVidia replaces the entire DRI stack. DDX, GLX, DRI, DRM, all custom. fglrx doesn't replace GLX. Just in case you were wondering.)
~ C.
Larrabee has a dedicated z-buffer module, there was no place for bringing it up in the article...Plus, much research has already been done in this are which the article didn't cover. Here's an example: Toward a Multicore Architecture for Real-time Ray-tracing -- this architecture benefits from secondary rays by equipping each tile with a shared L2 cache and exploiting locality
Also, 20% increase isn't much....really. With software simulators of new architecture, something between 10-20% increase in speed is within the margin of error.
FreeBSD bounties
I wonder if anyone has told these guys.... Or these guys?
Your own link refutes you. Fail.
Juggler was very impressive for the time, but it was "only" real time high-color-depth animation playback (although even the compression method used was probably impressive back then). It was not real-time raytracing. Yes, Amigas were famously one of the first computers that made raytracing possible for home (or even pro movie/TV) users back then, but I remember that rendering a simple raytraced scene (a couple of primitives) in apps like Imagine 3D would have to run for a few hours, if not overnight. That might have been on an Amiga 1200, rather than my older 500, too.
Yeah. _Not_ in real time. I admit the article is confusing, but that Amiga anim was not done in real time.
The rendered images were encoded in the Amiga's HAM display mode and then assembled into a single data file using a lossless delta compression scheme similar to the method that would later be adopted as the standard in the Amiga's ANIM file format.
You mention that things have 'moved on' from ray tracing to GI - but keep in mind that most GI methods (and certainly QMC sampling) -are- largely based on ray tracing. When people say 'ray tracing', we're not just talking about chrome spheres or perfect glass..glasses. It's the fundamental concept of 'tracing a ray' in the scene - and that fundamental concept applies not just to direct surface (illumination) calculations and reflections/refractions, but also to fuzzy reflections/refractions, area-sampled shadows, area lighting, sky/dome lighting, global illumination, sub-surface scattering, photon mapping (the photon tracing stage, that is) and so forth and so on.
You must have misread the article... it reads "20x", not "20%".
I.e. a 1900% increase. Or however one would put that. 20 times faster.. much easier. Still within the margin of error? :)
( also per the article, they're actually pondering 200x faster down the line. )
Like with anything, I call vaporware until they show real silicon. Not because I think they are lying, most companies don't. However there are plenty of overly ambitious companies out there. They think they have figured out some amazing way to leap ahead and get funding to start work... only to realize it's way harder than they believed.
A great example was the Elbrus E2K chip. Dunno if you remember that, it was back in 2000. A Russian group said they were going to make the Next Big Thing(tm) in processors. It'd kick the crap out of Intel. Well obviously this didn't come to pass. The reason wasn't that they were scammers, in fact Elbrus is a line of supercomputers made in Russia. The problem was they didn't know what they were doing with regards to this chip.
Their idea was more or less to put their Elbrus 3 supercomputer on to a chip... Ok fine but the things that you can do on that scale, don't always work on on the microscale. There are all sorts of new considerations. So while their thing was all nice in theory on a simulator, it was impossible to fab.
Intel and AMD aren't amazing because of the chips they design, they are amazing because they can then actually fab those chips economically. You can design something that'll smoke a Core i7 in simulations. However you probably can't make it a real chip.
This smells of the same sort of thing to me. Notice that they have press releases and some shiny demo pictures, but it was clearly done on a software simulator. Ok well shit, I can raytrace pretty pictures. That doesn't prove anything. Their card? Apparently not real yet, the picture of it is, well, just a raytrace.
So who knows? Maybe they really do have some amazing shit in the pipeline. Doesn't matter though, they've gotta make it real before it matters. nVidia releases pretty pictures too. Difference is the pictures of the cards are of actual cards, and the pictures rendered are done on the actual hardware.
I am just never impressed by sites heavy on the press releases and marketing, and light on the technical details, SDKs, engineering hardware pics, and so on.
I shall remain skeptical until more information is forthcoming.
I'm fully aware of that. Notice I didn't say we've moved on from ray tracing to GI. I said we've moved on from "SIMPLE" ray tracing - the operative word being "simple". Perhaps I should have been more clear and said "we've moved on from just basic raytracing to more advanced and accurate methods of ray tracing", but I figured my point was clear enough.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3qtq27J_rQ
( no, not a realdoll advert - it's a vid of their current test card being twirled around in a human's hands. then again, maybe they raytraced that )
What is "GI" referring to here?
Sounds like a plain old accuracy vs. time trade off. For a pixel in a given frame they choose some reflected/refracted rays to follow. They add noise or dither to their ray selection process so over time a pixel will converge to a nearly correct value. Moving items won't get an exact solution right away but they're moving so the viewer won't notice that the shadow isn't quite dark enough immediately or something in the mirror got a little jaggy for 3 frames.
In most games, the viewer moves more than objects do, so they'll have some work to do to avoid smearing everything in an RPS or run-around-real-fast thingy.
"Global Illumination"
It's a bit of a not-so-well-defined term, really, but within the context of current generation renderers, global illumination involves calculating not just direct lighting (i.e. a spot lighting a wall), but also diffuse indirect lighting (the light hitting the wall (dimly) illuminating the rest of the room) and even specular indirect lighting (such as caustics - like the light patterns you see in pools).
I think someone needs to read about the Osborne.
At some point (not too far away), the average size of a polygon in a scene will drop to one pixel or smaller. It seems like the different rendering techniques will merge together... a bit like the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces merged.
For something as ambitious as they have, it's very strange that their web site has no demos, absolutely nothing, of their products. No pictures, no videos, nothing.
Finally, 3DRealms can release DNF...it will only work with Caustic graphics cards, but it will have the absolutely bestest graphics this side of a Phantom console.
Nice try, though.
No existe.
They say it's patent pending, but I can't find the patent application on the USPTO site. Anyone have better luck? I'm just curious how the hell they deal with the incoherency of secondary rays.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Thanks for the explanation. However, names that require explanation are not good choices for the names of companies.
I remember when I first saw a very poorly drawn, shaky image of an animal and read that it was a Gnu, and read how clever the name was considered to be since it was, they said, "recursive": GNU is Not Unix.
It didn't bother the enthusiasts that most people in the world can't pronounce the name and have never seen a Gnu.
They found someone with artistic ability to make a better image of a GNU, but I've seen no evidence that anyone with technical knowledge realizes the depth of the self-defeat in choosing an obscure reference to an obscure animal.
To most people the word "caustic" means only "capable of burning, corroding, or dissolving".
Quote: "Unless they're like nVidia and sit around killing kittens all day..."
Just wondering: I am certainly aware of what I consider to be nVidia's lack of complete honesty. I would like to know why you aren't feeling positive toward nVidia.
About 1.5 hours per frame for relatively simple floating torus plus glass ball + checkerboard + infinite plane + lights and such on a stock Amiga 500. But compare what a regular PC of the time could do.
I only mentioned it for the sake of completeness. I've never tried implementing it myself for my own projects, and don't plan to. However, I understand that it converges faster than photon mapping for some scenes lit by light sources that are mostly occluded, like light from underneath the crack of a door. In the photon mapping scenario, few of the photons would contribute to the final image.
Movie studios and the like may not care about this, as they can just manually position their lights so this isn't an issue. If MLT isn't used much in industry, though, that may be in large part because, unlike photon mapping, MLT is patented.
I have no idea what you're smoking to make you think this was on Tom's Hardware and 26 pages long. Seems that the people who moderated you are stealing from your stash, though. Might want to keep a closer eye on your drugs.
I would just like to point out, Ray tracing is not some holy grail of perfection, far from it. Indeed buck for buck, rasterisation provides the same or higher image quality for a much lower cost.
Now obviously there are instances where raytracing helps, reflections and refractions can be generated on a per-pixel bases rather than rendering the reflection/refraction as a separate image and stretching/squishing said images in order to produce a similar effect. But saying this, if you render these separate images at a high enough quality you will get the same detail as a raytraced image, and still at a much lower cost than raytracing.
Ray tracing also does not help with shadows; For example, soft shadows. To raytrace a soft shadow you have to send out at least 16 rays per shadow calculation, for each light and even then your gonna suffer from nasty artefacts. Compared to the raster solution which involves rendering the zbuffer of any given light source and merely doing some blurring. same quality, much reduced cost.
I just wish that instead of investing so much time and effort into raytracing solutions people would instead apply the hardware that's generating these raytracing engines to a raster solution, if you took a conservative estimate of raster being 10x than raytracing for any given operation, then we are talking a huge leap forward in quality, a much larger leap than ray-traced reflections/refractions would give us.
Sorry -- next time we'll dumb it down for you.
For a foundation that might ever want to reach the general (computer using) public, taking feedback about their image losing anyone but a certified geek might be valuable...
Doesn't OpenGL 3 support real time raytracing already if you feed it enough hardware? Or did that not materialize in the final spec?
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
...massive list of failed graphics companies trying to do something novel in the last 10 years...
Seriously, can anyone name a single company that has made inroads into the nVidia/ATI duopoly? I can probably name a half dozen who have tried...
Yeah, I hear some people still collect pocket watches ;)
To most people the word "caustic" means only "capable of burning, corroding, or dissolving".
And most people aren't their target audience.
They're selling to people who do know what caustics are. And in their minds caustics means "Too slow to use in an animation."
There's plenty of 'realistic' renderers out there. If you mean 'doing it exactly as mother nature does', then no.. But if you look at something like the Maxwell Renderer, where you specify surface properties according to actual physical characteristics, etc. and the renderer itself calculates only by brute force (to tricks to speed things up - which invariably cause accuracy errors), then you get pretty darn close to a 'realistic' renderer.
Those who make the final decisions to buy a lot of very expensive video cards are unlikely to know that unusual meaning of "caustic".
Never trust a company that puts its name into just about each of its products. That is just lame, and there is no reason the product should not turn out to be just as lame. With attitude like that, there seems to be a lot of immature pride in that startup. They have probably hit gold in some calculations/algorithm and rushed to announce it will change the world. The truth is probably much more modest - they do have some technology or IP to offer, but it will require a lot of effort and hard work to make a difference, and in light of that this is just another company that believes in miracles. Google did that, but the PageRank thing had a lot to offer when it was introduced. I don't think it is the same kind of case.
And yes, I am serious.
Yes, the A1200 and A500 systems didn't come with floating point hardware by default, so they were pretty slow at rendering with things like Imagine and Lightwave..
The A3000 and some A4000s came with FPU hardware, these higher end Amigas were basically targeted at people wanting to do 3d rendering on them, the Amiga had quite a niche in this market for a while.
The speed difference between an A1200 with 14mhz 68020 and an A4000 with 50mhz 68060 is pretty massive.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
But a graphics company choosing a graphics related name, their target market will understand what it means even if noone else does.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
So what? To most people the word "Microsoft" means only "a tiny bit of softness".
Their market audience is 3D artists who you would hope know what the word means - not ignorant geeks on Slashdot.
I promised this 10 years ago, and where is my press? Pfft.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Even my MSX computer did real time raytracing like a champ, providing that all the pixels were produced from a 2D non-reflective surface using a 90 degree angle. Of course you had a limited color space, but otherwise everything run just smoothly.
Kidding aside, I suppose it's how far you want to take it. Amiga or MSX are not interesting anymore for about 90% of the things they did. The one exception is probably playing retro games.
It seems like GNU was not self-defeating, and that the gnu is no longer an obscure animal. Other than that...
Say, what was your point again?
BTW, the meaning of "caustic" to most people doesn't have much importance since most people won't be the direct customers of Caustic Graphics. The name does have a lot of meaning to the company's potential market: caustics are generally the most expensive and often critical part of photorealistic rendering. A company that chooses that word as part of its name has got to be pretty ballsy.
RTFGP. I was responding to a post about GNU and the FSF, whose audience should be the general public; but very often miss the mark in their communications.
I like how there are no demos, screenshots, pictures, etc. Just words.
Haven't we seen this before? Like, we totally discovered cold fusion in 1989. It was announced as true, so it must be!
So this year we'll have fully-raytraced high-def images at 30-60fps. Obviously it'll happen. They told me so.
I believe this is what Duke Nukem was waiting for
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/W/wheel-of-reincarnation.html
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
That's good advice. We'll have to explain this to Nvidia, ATI, Intel, Kraft, Toyota, Kodak, Dell, Sony, Nintendo, Sega, Addidas, Sears, etc.
Branding is about repeating the same word over and over until it is indellibly burned into the brain of the consumer. Sometimes this is better if the consumer doesn't already have pre-concieved impressions of that word in the realm that you're attempting to use it.