Wednesday, March 11th 2009
New Company - Caustic Graphics - Breaks Barriers in 3D Graphics
Caustic Graphics, a new 3D computer graphics company, launches today with a fundamental breakthrough in raytracing acceleration that is set to define a new era in professional 3D production and interactive consumer graphics. Raytracing, the gold-standard for creating 3D imagery, duplicates the natural physics of light, creating stunning images by meticulously tracing the path of light to and throughout any given scene.
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.
The computational complexity of producing cinema-quality, raytraced 3D images involves large, downstream costs, including slow "black box" design iterations and costly "render farm" server infrastructures. These costs are symptoms of a problem with today's computer designs where CPUs and GPUs are efficient at accelerating the rasterized graphics in video games but woefully inefficient at accelerating cinema-quality raytraced graphics. Caustic's forthcoming standards-based CausticRT platform enables highly parallel CPUs and GPUs to massively-accelerate raytracing, putting it on par with rasterization and resulting in cinema-quality 3D delivered interactively on low-cost PCs.
"Real-time raytracing has been the holy grail of computer graphics since 1979 - a dream always on the horizon but never within reach," said Dr. Jon Peddie, of Jon Peddie Research, the computer graphics market research firm in Tiburon, CA. "Demos have been done with 16 or more processors, super computers, and other esoteric devices, but never anything that was within reach of a PC budget. Caustic Graphics has made the breakthrough with a combination of a small hardware accelerator and some very innovative software to be able to deliver real-time, complex, high-resolution raytraced images - this is an amazing accomplishment." The Caustic management team is made up of technical visionaries and graphics experts from Autodesk, Apple, ATI, Intel and NVIDIA. Before starting Caustic, company founders James McCombe, Luke Peterson and Ryan Salsbury worked together at Apple, where McCombe was a lead architect for the company's OpenGL Graphics system and Chief Architect of Apple's rendering algorithms for the iPhone and iPod.
"For years, 3D professionals in multiple industries have labored under the yoke of slow iterations and unwieldy offline render farms," said Caustic Graphics CEO, Ken Daniels. "Caustic puts the power of a render farm, operating at interactive speeds, on every desktop, enabling designers and animators to get from concept to product faster, better and at lower cost." The Caustic product offering will be announced in April 2009.
Source:
Caustic Graphics
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.
"Real-time raytracing has been the holy grail of computer graphics since 1979 - a dream always on the horizon but never within reach," said Dr. Jon Peddie, of Jon Peddie Research, the computer graphics market research firm in Tiburon, CA. "Demos have been done with 16 or more processors, super computers, and other esoteric devices, but never anything that was within reach of a PC budget. Caustic Graphics has made the breakthrough with a combination of a small hardware accelerator and some very innovative software to be able to deliver real-time, complex, high-resolution raytraced images - this is an amazing accomplishment." The Caustic management team is made up of technical visionaries and graphics experts from Autodesk, Apple, ATI, Intel and NVIDIA. Before starting Caustic, company founders James McCombe, Luke Peterson and Ryan Salsbury worked together at Apple, where McCombe was a lead architect for the company's OpenGL Graphics system and Chief Architect of Apple's rendering algorithms for the iPhone and iPod.
"For years, 3D professionals in multiple industries have labored under the yoke of slow iterations and unwieldy offline render farms," said Caustic Graphics CEO, Ken Daniels. "Caustic puts the power of a render farm, operating at interactive speeds, on every desktop, enabling designers and animators to get from concept to product faster, better and at lower cost." The Caustic product offering will be announced in April 2009.
68 Comments on New Company - Caustic Graphics - Breaks Barriers in 3D Graphics
It says the the guys worked on opengl while at apple, does this mean their is a slim chance that we can run games without Directx down the road, wouldn't that be super for open source. Or am I going off on a tangent that doesn't exist.:)
rofl ...I am still waiting for ATI to release a Avivo Video Converter that will work on Vista 64 with my graphic cards.....man oh man my x1800xtx and x1950xtx did a nice job of it and I mis it!
Do you want to watch your screen doing math problems all day?? You wont even see that, youll just see a progress bar going from left to right.
OpenGL: Open Graphics Language. Partnering vendors can come up with their own versions of it.
i dont mean rendering as in watching HD.
Common OpenGL games still had portions that relied on DirectX. For example, idTech3 games relied on DirectSound as a 3D audio API. Its Linux ports however made do with any available audio driver (OSS, ALSA, etc.)
Time for me to start a company, make big claims, and wait for the buyers to come knocking ;)
Quake II, Quake III and Quake IV, though, ran via OpenGL (as did Doom3, Heretic II, Prey, and some other titles). In regards to Quake II, the biggest driving force again was not OpenGL itself, but 3DFX's Glide API.
Although ID Software (and partner company Raven Software) have been some of the largest supportive software developers that utilize OpenGL . . . OpenGL as we know it today, in regards to it's highly competitive visual capabilities and also it's performance abilities, owes a lot to 3DFX's pioneering of the Glide API - which was fully based off of the OpenGL API at the time, but was tweaked and targeted specifically for performance. The number of rendering calls were trimmed back to the extent that the API could be implimented solely via hardware, which allowed for games to be able to run extensively faster with Glide than with OpenGL (or DirectX). The performance margin in Glide, as well as OpenGL, was such that the early VooDoo series (through VooDoo3) have become legendary in the 3D graphics market. The Glide API brought new and fresh attention to OpenGL as well, with many new software developers taking a fresh look at OpenGL over DirectX . . . the newfound attention helped the API grow and evolve, and lead to substantial improvements with the API for OpenGl 2.0 released in 2006. The performance increasesand rendering tweaks from the Glide API were even visible for years after 3DFX's downfall and acquisition by nVidia . . . after nVidia acquired the company (and their intellectual property) in 2000, nVidia cards were notorious for outperforming ATI's cards in OpenGL applications through the X1900 series and early HD2000 series.
www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzEzNg
:roll: :toast: