Caustics Graphics, which hasgenerated some buzz last month, has posted a video showing their hardware running in interactive mode. This is not an eye-candy demo and the framerate peaks at about 5fps, but it is supposed to show that they have working hardware and software. If you wonder, there are5M triangles in the scene.
Professionals interested in Ray-Tracing can figure out if they want to try this or not (additional coding is required), but the average gamer certainly won’t be blown away. To be fair, this is very decent for programmer’s art, but the marketing machine needs good-looking and fast demosto convince.
Exactly last year, Intel sparked controversial discussions about Ray-Tracing versus Rasterization (NVIDIA replied quickly), two different techniques (non mutually-exclusive) to render computer graphics. We think that the future is a mix of both techniques, as they each have pros and cons. In the meantime, Caustics Graphics might find clients willing to buy its hardware for special projects, buttheir productseems very remote from becoming a consumer product.
Caustic Graphics—Raytracing Dynamic Geometry from Caustic Graphics on Vimeo.
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