THE BORE
General => The Superdeep Borehole => Topic started by: Kestastrophe on March 09, 2009, 05:22:46 PM
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123655461519565819.html?mg=com-wsj (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123655461519565819.html?mg=com-wsj)
Caustic Graphics Inc., plans to exploit a technique called ray-tracing that generates extremely accurate three-dimensional images. Ray-tracing is a mainstay of Hollywood studios, but remains out of reach for most PC users. A single image can take hours to generate; rendering a film can take months on hundreds of server systems.
Computer games and other PC software typically rely on a technology called rasterization. Though the results keep getting more realistic, developing an interactive form of ray-tracing has been a longtime quest in the computer industry.
Caustic, whose name refers to light rays reflecting off a curved object, says it is close to achieving that goal. The company says its software and chips allow graphics chips to carry out ray-tracing calculations at a 20-fold speed-up compared with existing PC hardware. It said it expects to deliver chips by early 2010 that will be about 200 times faster.
In a demonstration, Caustic executives manipulated a photo-quality image of a sports car, removing components and changing lighting and background settings to change reflections on the vehicle's surface.
"It's the first honest acceleration of ray-tracing I've seen," said Jon Peddie, a market researcher in Tiburon, Calif., who specializes in graphics technology.
Hopefully someone with knowledge/insight will chime in on this ray-tracing vs. rasterization blah blah blah
Also:
Mr. McCombe expects accelerator cards using its chips to cost about the same as existing graphics accelerators, adding that its circuitry eventually could be combined with graphics chips.
Smothe Groove annihilated