Raytrace accelerator

[^Lele^]

i guess support for this in vray RT would be extremly cool (from what i read on their page there they want support any rendering software which in interested, brazil is only one example they make themselves to demonstrate the techology)

Quite expensive, i suppose, to buy the whole company to "demonstrate" the technology.
I really hope that if the technology has true merit, they will behave in an unbiased and professional manner.

[davidr]

[QUOTE=^Lele^;399761]Quite expensive, i suppose, to buy the whole company to "demonstrate" the technology.
QUOTE]
$11 million for Splutterfish

So nVidia buys mental images, Caustic buys Splutterfish, then the next is ATI will buy Chaos Group?

[natty]

Sounds like ART to me .... the Pure card, but i guess this that wasn't real time?

[^Lele^]

bah, the chips seem "slow" (100mhz), and from the talks on the video, it seems they have "invented" something clever primarily from the code point of view.
He talks about rays having volume, as in not being thin, but having some form of thickness to themselves, which ought to do stuff like AA for nearly free.
In the video, however, the features look allright, i guess, but the images are butt ugly.
I still don't know if it would be able to behave as a generic accelerator with shaders as complex as those possible with Vray: it may have been a developer image, or some true limitation to the shader complexity.
I may have gotten it wrong, but the demo video is actually NOT rendered on the CausticOne card, rather on the octacore host.

[davidr]

Sounds like ART to me .... the Pure card, but i guess this that wasn't real time?

We used to use ART Renderdrives, and they were definitely NOT realtime: renders at 3412x2700 took from 24-80 hours, and the Pure cards were cut-down Renderdrives, and couldn't use the system CPUs or GPu at all, had to use their own renderer, camera and lights, couldn't accelerate any other renderer -they were particularly bad. Caustic's thing sounds more general-purpose, so may be much more useful. I think Larabee might be interesting, too.

[MasterBercon]

Rays having "thickness" is nothing new, all proper raytracers should support it (I'm 90% sure VRay does, Brazil does etc.). It doesn't do AA, it allows you to filter procedural maps, in the video Checker map, so that they don't require AA too look smooth.

It'll be intresting to see what operations exactly can they accelerate in raytracing.

[lllab]

i read a bit through the papers and it seems to me that what they invented is basicly a way to prepare the code very efficient for an cpu (or for their own on their card), so they overcome any unnecessarry calculations or chache problems.

also nice an open they support all 3 mayjor OS's, win, osx and linux.
so this looks not very tailored to only brazil. i think only brazil was relatively cheap to get at the moment, they lost a lot of ground last years.

therefore it really sounds this could be used in any renderer. if they can make it for brazil it can be quite certain useful for vray. they also emphasis on their page their technology is not a render engine at all or related to one, but "only" a soft and/or hardware render excellerator.
what they showed in video was only a fast self tailored one to show the technology.

for me they look interesting if it is really fast like they show. such a card option would not hurt to be used in vray i assume

cheers
stefan