Raytracing revisited

Mirror · Post by **Mirror** » Sat Apr 25, 2009 1:41 pm

hey. a little more than one month ago a start-up company called caustic became popular for announcing an acceleration hardware for raytracing.

today i noticed they have released their hardware ( 1st version ) and there are some reviews/videos.

their website is at www.caustic.com

p.s. : too bad it's too expensive ( $4k dollars

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BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Sun Apr 26, 2009 6:24 am

If you want an educated opinion: http://ompf.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1248

Anyway I hope they show us something nice eventually, personally I'm more excited about the LRB.

Mirror · Post by **Mirror** » Sun Apr 26, 2009 10:35 am

i read the 1st page ( 11 march ) and the 7th ( 23-25 april ) but it seems that they are still commenting with the old info without any hardware released. the board has already been released to some developers, it has 4GB of RAM onboard and it operates at 100MHz, it runs on FPGA. next version, next year, will run on ASIC ( faster ). The issue is that according to them, it's not about how many stream processors you if you haven't solved the search ( Database ) issue.

there are 2 videos on their websites and many links to articles on other sites ( anandtech / tomshardware etc ) from 24/25 april.

yes we will see what larrabe can do, i have hopes for it too.

wITTus · Post by **wITTus** » Sun Apr 26, 2009 11:57 am

I'm wondering if raytracing would totally antiquate our common rendering techniques.