From nowhere Caustic Graphics appeared and even if the company was founded by ex. Apple engineers they are not targeting the retail market, but it has an interesting concept looking to turn modern graphics upside down. CausticOne is the name of its first graphics card that together with the programming tool CausticGL makes up the founding of the platform CausticRT. With this platform they hope to take the Ray-Tracing market by storm and it claims that its solution is already 20 times faster than similar systems.
Today’s launch of CausticRT will just be the first step along the way. In 2010 it will launch chips that are up to 200 times faster than today’s equivalents.
“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.”
Ray-Tracing is a technology that is mainly used for 3D rendering and by tracing rays of light (thus the name; raytracing) you can create incredibly realistic pictures with reflections and shadows that are hard to separate from actual photographs.
CausticRT rendered picture (via Autospies)
Raytracing can theoretically also be used in video games and similar, the technology was used in the game Myst back in the 90’s, but the problem is that the technology is incredibly resource intensive, whereas Caustic Graphics sits on a potential gold mine if it can live up to its potential.
We will cover the progress of Caustic Graphics which may very well become the real breakthrough for the raytracing technology.
