I work for ART VPS, the new version of Adrian's original company. Thanks for a great chip, Adrian!:-)
What you soon find when writing a renderer is that the ray intersection engine is the smallest part of it - productising takes almost all the work. There are renderers at all parts of the price/performance/quality cube. The ART VPS renderer is scalable - we have versions going from 8-36 chips, each of which has two of the ray intersection and shading cores.
The features of a renderer are all in the software, and we've been working hard to keep our features up to date and ahead of the competition.
I suspect we'll see more ray tracing hardware in the future as current realtime rasterisation algorithms start to get too expensive due to the geometry factor. I don't know how soon in the future as I think that there is still plenty of room left for ameliorating complexity without changing the visibility algorithm to ray tracing. As far as features go, NVidia Gelato shows that multi-pass methods can be used to produce arbitrarily complex rendering and shading.
However in offline rendering almost everyone is now doing ray tracing. PRMan 11 supports ray tracing, Mental Ray is now shipped with Maya (which already had its own renderer that supported ray tracing), etc. The ART VPS renderer using either PURE or RenderDrive is being constantly improved - we have to otherwise the competition would take the lead. And we still offer features and performance that the others can't match.
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I work for ART VPS, the new version of Adrian's original company. Thanks for a great chip, Adrian! :-)
What you soon find when writing a renderer is that the ray intersection engine is the smallest part of it - productising takes almost all the work. There are renderers at all parts of the price/performance/quality cube. The ART VPS renderer is scalable - we have versions going from 8-36 chips, each of which has two of the ray intersection and shading cores.
The features of a renderer are all in the software, and we've been working hard to keep our features up to date and ahead of the competition.
I suspect we'll see more ray tracing hardware in the future as current realtime rasterisation algorithms start to get too expensive due to the geometry factor. I don't know how soon in the future as I think that there is still plenty of room left for ameliorating complexity without changing the visibility algorithm to ray tracing. As far as features go, NVidia Gelato shows that multi-pass methods can be used to produce arbitrarily complex rendering and shading.
However in offline rendering almost everyone is now doing ray tracing. PRMan 11 supports ray tracing, Mental Ray is now shipped with Maya (which already had its own renderer that supported ray tracing), etc. The ART VPS renderer using either PURE or RenderDrive is being constantly improved - we have to otherwise the competition would take the lead. And we still offer features and performance that the others can't match.
Matthew
Software Engineer
www.artvps.com