Caustic beats Intel to the punch with real time ray tracing?

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Silent.Sin

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Cuastic Graphics announces the CausticOne™ video card

Caustic Graphics® introduces CausticRT the world's first massively accelerated raytracing system - a perfect ray-trace machine on a workstation graphics card. Use CausticRT to create a uniquely high-performance, scalable rendering environment where image quality is never compromised.
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Seems a little rushed to push a real time ray tracing tech out to retail with 100% of today's games being rasterized, but I always welcome fresh thinking. Looks like they have some noteworthy talent onboard at least. What do you guys think?
 
Maybe they're target market isn't gamers. Could it have professional rendering applications?
 
Very interesting, but doubtless exceedingly expensive, prohibitively so for anyone not running a large development studio or design firm. Also seems a little early as you say; I suspect the proprietary nature of their solution (and relatively small, little-known company backing it) will come back to bite their adopters in the end.

To the above poster, it's clear if you look at their site that they're not at all concerned with your typical end user / gamer.
 
Menelmarar said:
Maybe they're target market isn't gamers. Could it have professional rendering applications?
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The site sends some mixed signals, there's multiple articles linked about how this will improve game graphics, but there are also articles detailing how to use this solution to enable faster rendering of non-realtime media as well. Some charts even show it almost like an add-on card to be used in conjunction with an existing video card or CPU and use those as compute resources. Would certainly like a more in depth explanation of what this thing is exactly. The more I look at it the more I think this is just a ray tracing accelerator for professional rendering houses meant to make that whole process faster than using the CPU alone. Hopefully they'll be forthcoming with details and this isn't just 2009's version of BitBoys Oy.
 
Ray tracing is the future of gaming right? Isnt that where everyone wants to get things?
 
DeathCloud said:
Ray tracing is the future of gaming right? Isnt that where everyone wants to get things?
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It's debatable... and certainly a lot slower with any kind of hardware currently available. Until there is a massive shift in GPU design there is no sense worrying about ray tracing. Considering the costs involved in such a switch and the other risks -- the fact is, no one knows how to do it, currently, not just because it's cost prohibitive. We could be looking at years of dedicated development, and breakthroughs are anything but guaranteed, obviously.

OpenGL has some raytracing elements implemented already, but Direct X (in so far as I know) has none. Zero. And it's much more widely used in games. Developing new standards is difficult. Adding entirely new instruction sets to existing standards is pretty much the same thing. Developers don't like either.

For example, this Caustic 1 coprocessor card is likely $3000+ (easily 2-3x, even 5x that, as it's a first generation product with no direct competition)... and to put it bluntly, it probably sucks at real time raytracing. Sure, it'll do it, but not particularly well, and not in really complex scenes -- at least, not in real time. Faster than a dual quad opteron or dual quad xeon machine? Likely. But not real time with really complex stuff.

In truth, if it were that fast, where are the videos bragging? Does this company have /no/ marketing department? I doubt this is the case. It's more a proof-of-concept thing that devs will be paying through the nose for, if they pay at all.

The kind of power required for real time raytracing makes it unfeasibly expensive for the end user, and until the end user (and by this I mean /everyone/, not just hardcore enthusiasts) can afford effective raytracing capable hardware /no one/ will be stupid enough to write games or other software (for consumers) that uses it. No one.

Sadly, this stuff is a long way off yet.
 
I personally dont think raytracing will ever make sense for most pc games. Its just overkill, there are too many techniques and optimizations that can be done to achieve similar effects at a quarter of the horsepower/cost raytracing demands.

I think what we may see in the future is more work on lighting engines built directly into graphics cards at a much higher level than regular T&L engines.
 
I think their patents are going to have problems with "Prior Art":

http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/SaarCOR/

and it's successor:

http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/~woop/rpu/rpu.html

And while the performance may be meagre with these boards, remember they're FPGA boards running at 66Mhz. In comparison, a GeForce FX5700 "from NVIDIA provide 23 times more programmable floating point performance and 100 times more memory bandwidth as [their] prototype."

So, when they can get these in dedicated silicon, and increase the speed some, this will easily do everything Caustic claims now. So, basically, 100% prior art.
 
Consumers just aren't going to spend money on more addon gaming hardware. Look what happend with the Killer NIC, and Ageia's addin physics card for example. Legitimate products, but no demand. Their best hope is they create a decent product and some IP and nVidia/Intel/AMD bid for a buyout and the founders get rich.
 
silent-circuit said:
I suspect the proprietary nature of their solution (and relatively small, little-known company backing it) will come back to bite their adopters in the end.
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That's what I was thinking, unless "CausticGL" somehow becomes the industry standard (and ignoring the fact that there's no CausticDX, which would limit the gaming applications), it'll end up in the same sort of niche as physics accelerators.
 
when I hear John Carmack say CausticGL is all that - then I'll believe what these guys are claiming.....
 
I think this is a good idea, looks like a add-on board. Ageia and Killer ARE good cards.

Games and stuff do look good ray-traced. Intel has shown demos. You think Pixar et al think rasterization is the future? its just a cheap (processing power) way of estimating the world. Ray tracing looks better and is more realistic.

Why cant you guys be happy for them, maybe its the background here that puts you in such a bad mood.

Would be nice to see some running apps or actual cards.
 
A good combination of both ray tracing and rasterization is the future. For now though, real-time ray tracing will definitely come in handy for design studios and engineering firms, where they need accurate images.
 
silent-circuit said:
No, I believe they have working retail level hardware, but it could be just a bit hoax / stunt to pull in capitol. We'll see.
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Well, look at the "card": http://www.caustic.com/caustic-rt_caustic-one.php It's not even a photo. :p Along with the lack of any demos, it looks and smells like vapor.

Geez, even nvidia's RT demos from last year offered a larger speed-up than what Caustic is claiming and that wasn't a big deal at the time.
 
Their site does seem very cheased/fake. Their video card picture is fully cgi, and their little processor at the bottom is a recolored C2D :p
 
pxc said:
Well, look at the "card": http://www.caustic.com/caustic-rt_caustic-one.php It's not even a photo. :p Along with the lack of any demos, it looks and smells like vapor.

Geez, even nvidia's RT demos from last year offered a larger speed-up than what Caustic is claiming and that wasn't a big deal at the time.
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I agree. In fact further reading on the website shows they aren't pitching the card as a gaming device, but as an aid to games development (and other industry visualisations). This no different to what nVidia already offers with their powerful Quadro FX cards etc.

The changing graphics in the banners are old raytracings from elsewhere rendered on different platforms with different software. Many artists in the industry will recognise a good few of them.

Tastes like vapour. :D
 
Ray-tracing isn't the future. It's a big simplification of what happens around us in the best rendered game ever, AKA 'Real Life': Photon Mapping. Essentially it is 'mapping' every single photon, or ray, emitted by a light source and calculating its effect on any surface it encounters. This method provides absolutely perfect visualization and is the holy grail in 3D rendering. It is also computationally on the scale of modelling the local weather, as the number of interactions and resulting data is immense.

There are simplifications of this method, all of which can be used with rasterization, yet provide results much better than are obtainable with ray-tracing. The game engine my company uses, for example, uses an evolved version of deferred rendering, which has been used in a number of games already, the titles of which have slipped my mind right now.

In short: not impressed :p
 
Am I the only one who noticed the site talking about how it takes as much as 3-hours per frame to render a production quality film-resolution scene? I would imagine they're talking about increasing the speed of production rendering by providing a ray-tracing co-processor.(Coincindentally, that's exactly what they say...)

As far as it being vapor, who knows. They don't seem to have anything substantial or "real" on their site, so that's a strike against them :/
 
pxc said:
Well, look at the "card": http://www.caustic.com/caustic-rt_caustic-one.php It's not even a photo. :p Along with the lack of any demos, it looks and smells like vapor.

Geez, even nvidia's RT demos from last year offered a larger speed-up than what Caustic is claiming and that wasn't a big deal at the time.
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The picture of that chip bottom left is an intel socket 775 core 2 chip with their logo photochopped onto it. They could have at least gotten a little more creative in their photochopping. Maybe taken off the arrow that points to the corner on the socket.
 
Looks like another Physx Add-in card. Question really is: How long till nVidia buys them out and releases software and says the GTX200 series already supports it. :p
















(I know, I know, the 200 series wouldn't actually support this in hardware.)
 
ma701apm said:
I think this is a good idea, looks like a add-on board. Ageia and Killer ARE good cards.
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lol Ageia cards are obsolete now and Killer cards are a gimmick IMO.

Does anyone know why the flash banner on their website shows an ESRB E for Everyone rating? Are they trying to imply that it can play games or is it their clever way of saying everyone should buy it? :p
 
If they can put a youtube video of some guy's holding the card and acting like tards, why can't they show the card *doing something*? Maybe it doesn't actually *work*, which is almost the same as not having it?
 
Are those SODIMMs used for the memory? If so, it doesn't appear to be an extremely high bandwidth device. Which also, the PCI-e X1 suggests.

Guess raytracing requires a lot of processing, but not a lot of output?
 
I don't doubt the existence of the card, in at least some stage. But that youtube video, the card seems off. It looks like it was thrown together from spare parts.

Not to mention, their stupid demeanor just screams "High Class Unveiling" =\
 
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