Caustic Graphics Ray Tracing Acceleration Technology Review

[Mechromancer]

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=694&type=expert

NEATO! Its not vaporware afterall.

http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/694/card-mem.jpg

[B.E.E.F.]

Wow! :bounce:

[RaZz!]

their logo somehow reminds me to matrox' former logo (http://www.jetpcs.de/Pictures/Logos/Matrox_logo.jpg) :p:

[saaya]

yeah, it looks a bit like the gskill logo too, doesnt it?

[halo112358]

More about caustic here: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/04/caustic-graphics-launches-real-time-ray-tracing-platform.ars

Stokes makes a couple of really good points in the article, I found this one interesting.

As far as the debatable visual merits of ray tracing versus rasterization-plus-hacks, that criticism still stands. But Caustic's true value proposition isn't so much in ray tracing's alleged visual superiority to rasterization (I'll let the Caustic guys debate this with rasterization's proponents) as it is in ray tracing's potential to cut down on game development costs.

For a rasterization-based game engine, artists have to generate shadow maps, reflections, and other lighting-related elements for a scene by hand. So instead of just creating textures and models for a scene, the artists also have to compose the entire scene by putting all of the elements together and then manually filling in many of the lighting effects. This sort of thing takes a lot of time, and it drives up the cost of game development by making it much more labor-intensive process.

Real-time ray tracing essentially shifts this lighting work from artists to the game engine, so that regardless of what you do with a scene, the lighting, shadows, and reflections are visually correct without any labor-intensive artistic sleight-of-hand. So even if initial ray-traced games don't quite live up to the visual standards of the current generation of rasterized games, they would be easier and cheaper to make because artists can spend more time on textures and models and less time fussing over how those assets interact with the lighting in a scene.

In this respect, Caustic's value proposition isn't so much that the real-time ray tracing that its technology enables provides a vastly superior gaming experience, but rather that RTRT makes for cheaper game development.

I'm rooting for these guys, they're local and they've made something that's pretty kick ass.

[Mechromancer]

Anybody try POVRay 3.7 Beta lately? The speedup we see with this Caustic One may not look impressive, but go ahead and render in POV. 5FPS is absolutely-f'ing-amazing! We may see ray traced games starting to become standard in only 5 years.

[initialised]

I like the idea of the check box (in game or in driver) that off loads ray-tracing to a separate ASIC (FPGA is proof of concept IMHO) for lighting and shadow effects letting the GPU(s) do what they're good at. Then as ray-tracing gains ground we might see their IP integrated into drivers or GPU hardware. I also think it would be possible for GPU driver software to dynamically scale the bounce depth of ray-tracing (to maintain FPS in raster + ray hybrid engines) and think that it would be a good idea to (and suspect nVidia already do (only way GTX275 can beat HD 4890)) do this with AA & AF to get high minimum FPS at high IQ. Also don't discount next gen consoles as potential early adopters.

[saaya]

More about caustic here: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/04/caustic-graphics-launches-real-time-ray-tracing-platform.ars

Stokes makes a couple of really good points in the article, I found this one interesting.


I'm rooting for these guys, they're local and they've made something that's pretty kick ass.


Real-time ray tracing essentially shifts this lighting work from artists to the game engine, so that regardless of what you do with a scene, the lighting, shadows, and reflections are visually correct without any labor-intensive artistic sleight-of-hand. So even if initial ray-traced games don't quite live up to the visual standards of the current generation of rasterized games, they would be easier and cheaper to make because artists can spend more time on textures and models and less time fussing over how those assets interact with the lighting in a scene.
thats a very interesting point indeed... raytracing makes lightning and shadows realistic... but is that what game developers really want?
im not so sure about that... especially lightning effects arent exactly meant to be realistic and follow the laws of physics of the real world...

[turbox997]

Also reviewed by Anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3549

[The0men]

thats a very interesting point indeed... raytracing makes lightning and shadows realistic... but is that what game developers really want?
im not so sure about that... especially lightning effects arent exactly meant to be realistic and follow the laws of physics of the real world...

I guess they could still make the lighting look unrealistic,
it's just easier for them to make it realistic.
Plus hey, cheaper is cheaper, and wouldn't it be nice
to have cheaper games, is developers can pass
along the savings, that would be nice.

I like the way ray traced images looks, so I really hope this goes well.
Also not being one of the major players, I always hope the little guy does well.

They also seemed to have done alot more market research than Ageia did.
I think they could actually live up to alot of their own ideas.