Ray tracing card announced

Caustic Graphics claims real time ray tracing not far away.

Some time back, real-time ray-tracing was supposed to be the next best thing, however promise of products mostly turned out to be vapourware.

Now a startup called Caustic Graphics is going to have a go with the technology using a dedicated add-in accelerator board. The outfit launched first card Caustic One last week.

Currently we only have the press release to go on, which sadly does not plug into the computer and allow us to test it. However it claims that it can enable your CPU/GPU to render 3D imagery 20x faster than it can today.

The outfit has 15 patents for its raytracing technology and algorithms which allow punters to off-load raytracing calculations and prepare data for your GPU/CPU, unlock its ability to shade with complete efficiency and performance.

Apparently, what has kept real time ray tracing off the technology radar is the fact that people could not do much about incoherent rays.

True raytracing allows primary rays to bounce and scatter secondary rays throughout complex scenes. However sometimes these secondary rays get incoherent and go off and do their own thing - pop to the shops, have a fag or something not that useful.

But Caustic thinks that these rays are the key to creating the advanced effects required to achieve photorealism in complex images.

Apparently CausticOne, loves being incoherent and encourages the use of multiple secondary rays per pixel. CausticOne claims to use bandwidth-friendly ray processing that enables your CPU/GPU to shade with rasterisation-like efficiency.

However the word on the web is that even if Caustic is able to do what it says, it might be a bit hard to find someone who wants to buy it.