Nvidia, AMD … and Caustic?!! New Ray-Tracing Graphics Company Arrives
Evidently a brand new PC Graphics company has just appeared. They are called Caustic Graphics and they just announced their presence with claims that their new raytracing-based PC graphics processing unit will be able to outperform current solutions by up to 20 times!
They claim that their next-generation product – which is projected to be due out in early 2010 – will have 200 times the performance of current solutions. Caustic Graphics will base their graphics product on raytracing, a graphics technique supported by Intel that allows for accurate and fast production of 3D graphics. Although raytracing has had issues with low-performance compared to traditional rasterization solutions, Caustic claims that their technology will put it “on par with rasterization and resulting in cinema-quality 3D delivered interactively on low-cost PCs.” In their own words:
Caustic’s first-generation technology will deliver an average 20X increase in the speed used to create stunning, realistic 3D imagery for film and video, game development, as well as automotive and consumer product design. The second generation of Caustic’s technology, due early next year, is expected to gain an additional order of magnitude in performance, offering 200X speed over today’s state-of-the-art graphics products. This massive speed jump is due to Caustic’s patent-pending raytracing algorithms implemented in a semiconductor design.
The San Fransisco-based Caustic plans to reveal more info about their first product in April 2009. Here is their press release
Caustic Graphics® introduces CausticRT the world’s first massively accelerated raytracing system – a perfect ray-trace machine on a workstation graphics card. Use CausticRT to create a uniquely high-performance, scalable rendering environment where image quality is never compromised.
Bold words indeed. Caustic plans to reveal more next month. It appears that they are aimed at the workstation and then at high-end PC graphics. Stay tuned. We will keep you informed of the latest developments, as always.
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