I founded Advanced Rendering Technology which created the world's first ray tracing chip (AR250, 1997).
It's a lot easier said than done. But the potential is enormous.
I've been watching these guys' web site for a while, and it is great that
they now have something decent to show for their work!
It's important to realise that going from a prototype to a real marketable
product may take a *lot* of effort, particularly in this field. If you
don't provide the highest quality and features, you'd have to compete
mainly on speed. If you provide all the features and quality needed
for rendering movies, you have a very complex product. It's not clear where
this project is headed, but it seems to be mainly a research vehicle at the
moment.
They say that Programmable shading, Parallel rendering and Global illumination
are on their research agenda, so they're probably quite a way from
a full-featured rendering system.
At Advanced Rendering Technology, we jumped in at the deep end! We took in
over £14m of investors' cash to (try to) create a full-featured hardware ray tracing appliance.
The products are still being marketed at http://www.art-render.com/, but
the original company ran out of cash and has been liquidated. A brief explanation
of what happened is below.
The business was created in March 1995 from the results of my Ph.D work at Cambridge University (UK).
The chip, the AR250 was loosely based around the system described in my thesis "Real-time ray tracing on an
advanced HDTV framestore", published in 1993 (not available online, but see patent).
The business was built on a shoestring at the start, getting early investment installments of just £50,000 ($75,000 then).
With this funding, we set out detailed create proof-of-concept and a full business plan.
The plan agreed was to develop and market a rendering appliance, based on:
A) A multi-million transistor graphics processor, comprising ray/object intersection pipeline,
programmable shading coprocessor, and microprocessor-based control circuit.
B) Parallel processing accelerator boards with up to 64 processors
C) An embedded Linux system (we used Dec Alpha initially)
D) An efficient and robust RenderMan Shading Language Compiler
E) Rendering/driver software capable of accurate area lighting, motion blur,
depth of field, volumetric effects, even for multi-million object scenes
and resolution of 6k x 4k or higher.
F) A suite of application plug-in network RenderMan drivers, with support
for 3D-Studio Max, Alias|Waverfront, Soft Image, as well as RenderMan direct
G) Throughput of "up to 1000x" existing software solutions on contemporary PC hardware
and once we had done all that lot, we'd shrink it to a single card and
in due course move it to a real-time high-end visualisation solution.
Some "experts" said it was actually *impossible* to parallelize ray tracing
in the way we had claimed! Others just said it was too ambitious.
Investors were *very* enthusiastic about the project, but demanded
unrealistically short timescales with no slack. Process quality,
management, testing and documentation went out of the window.
They also demanded veto rights over any significant changes to the plan
To stick within the budget, we could only afford to employ one experienced chip designer
(increased from the initial plan of nil(!)), and we couldn't have access to
a full set of software tools either.
To stick within the schedule, we had to assume the chip would be
"right first time", and would be saleable within months of receipt from
the fab. The software systems would have to be built concurrently
with chip design. There was no time or budget for fixing design issues
with the chips. The first prototypes had to go to paying customers.
It became clear in 1996 that we needed access to an additional chip
development tool not budgeted for. This led to a six month(!)
Slashdot Mirror
I've been watching these guys' web site for a while, and it is great that they now have something decent to show for their work!
It's important to realise that going from a prototype to a real marketable product may take a *lot* of effort, particularly in this field. If you don't provide the highest quality and features, you'd have to compete mainly on speed. If you provide all the features and quality needed for rendering movies, you have a very complex product. It's not clear where this project is headed, but it seems to be mainly a research vehicle at the moment.
They say that Programmable shading, Parallel rendering and Global illumination are on their research agenda, so they're probably quite a way from a full-featured rendering system.
At Advanced Rendering Technology, we jumped in at the deep end! We took in over £14m of investors' cash to (try to) create a full-featured hardware ray tracing appliance. The products are still being marketed at http://www.art-render.com/, but the original company ran out of cash and has been liquidated. A brief explanation of what happened is below.
The business was created in March 1995 from the results of my Ph.D work at Cambridge University (UK). The chip, the AR250 was loosely based around the system described in my thesis "Real-time ray tracing on an advanced HDTV framestore", published in 1993 (not available online, but see patent).
The business was built on a shoestring at the start, getting early investment installments of just £50,000 ($75,000 then). With this funding, we set out detailed create proof-of-concept and a full business plan. The plan agreed was to develop and market a rendering appliance, based on:
A) A multi-million transistor graphics processor, comprising ray/object intersection pipeline, programmable shading coprocessor, and microprocessor-based control circuit.
B) Parallel processing accelerator boards with up to 64 processors
C) An embedded Linux system (we used Dec Alpha initially)
D) An efficient and robust RenderMan Shading Language Compiler
E) Rendering/driver software capable of accurate area lighting, motion blur, depth of field, volumetric effects, even for multi-million object scenes and resolution of 6k x 4k or higher.
F) A suite of application plug-in network RenderMan drivers, with support for 3D-Studio Max, Alias|Waverfront, Soft Image, as well as RenderMan direct
G) Throughput of "up to 1000x" existing software solutions on contemporary PC hardware
and once we had done all that lot, we'd shrink it to a single card and in due course move it to a real-time high-end visualisation solution.
Some "experts" said it was actually *impossible* to parallelize ray tracing in the way we had claimed! Others just said it was too ambitious.
Investors were *very* enthusiastic about the project, but demanded unrealistically short timescales with no slack. Process quality, management, testing and documentation went out of the window. They also demanded veto rights over any significant changes to the plan
To stick within the budget, we could only afford to employ one experienced chip designer (increased from the initial plan of nil(!)), and we couldn't have access to a full set of software tools either.
To stick within the schedule, we had to assume the chip would be "right first time", and would be saleable within months of receipt from the fab. The software systems would have to be built concurrently with chip design. There was no time or budget for fixing design issues with the chips. The first prototypes had to go to paying customers.
It became clear in 1996 that we needed access to an additional chip development tool not budgeted for. This led to a six month(!)