raytracing posts

It's been a while since a PC graphics company has made a big challenge to the big Three (Intel, Nvidia, ATI) in terms of supporting games. The last such company was 3dfx who championed the 3D acceleration movement in the late 1990s but couldn't keep up the pace and was sold to Nvidia.

Today a new company called Caustic Graphics has officially announced its presence with claims that their PC graphics product will be able to out perform current solutions by up to 20 times. It also claims that their second-generation product, due out in early 2010, will have 200 times (and that's not a typo) the performance of current solutions. Caustic Graphics will base their graphics product on raytracing, a graphics technique that allows for highly realistic looking 3D graphics. Raytracing has also proven to have issues with performance in the past but Caustic claims their technology "enables highly parallel CPUs and GPUs to massively-accelerate raytracing, putting it on par with rasterization and resulting in cinema-quality 3D delivered interactively on low-cost PCs."

The San Fransisco-based Caustic plans to reveal more info about their first product in April 2009. At the moment they are targeting high end computing needs but we suspect that PC gaming is also in their plans.

As some game developers look toward getting more photo-realism in their graphics, it seems one possible route is gaining some traction. Raytracing allows for some incredible effects (like shown above in this raytracing demo version of Quake IV) but at the cost of some serious CPU and GPU performance. Now an Intel rep has stated that real raytracing games, not just tech demos, are only a few years away.

In a chat with PC Games Hardware, Intel's Michael Vollmer states, "We keep in touch with companies all over the world - I dare say that in two to three years time we will see something." He added, however, that " . . . the migration to a new programming technology takes years; Raytracing is still in an early stage." So don't go crazy buying that 32 processor core PC with 16 GPUs inside just yet to run Quake 6.