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."

Comments

Re:Surely they could have chosen a better name.

[Tablizer]

"Caustic" Graphics? Would you want to do business with a video company that names itself after a chemical that damages your eyes?

Microsoft's non-macho name never hurt it.....unfortunately.
           

Re:I'll believe it when I see it!

[ion.simon.c]

But what good does it do for anyone if it hardly works?

What's broken about it?

nVidia's drivers have done their job for me...

ATi has *NEVER* had good drivers. They fucking suck at writing drivers. They always have, and -if trends continue- always will.
nVidia's rewrite of the majority of X.org graphics bits fails 'cause it's an ongoing *massive* duplication of effort. When the x.org folks put bugfixes or enhancements in to some component that nVidia has duplicated in their driver, everyone who depends on nVidia's software has to wait and see if nVidia will be arsed to fix their code. When everyone but nVidia decides to stop using a feature and move on to something different, nVidia's kinda stuck with all that effort that they put into a now-deprecated way of doing things.

I'd rather replace half of X.org with nVidia's code...

I suppose this means you don't care about the future of X.org? I understand that nVidia's policy is to *NEVER* help out open source. So, what they're doing makes perfect sense from that standpoint. However, it *never* makes long term sense for an open-source project to depend on closed-source binaries which provide a significant portion of the project's functionality. [1] You can't have a healthy project in this sort of scenario.

But, I digress. I assume that you don't give a flying fuck about the health of any of the projects behind the system that you use. You just want your system to work right now. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

[1] Wifi firmware is a whole other kettle of worms.