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...but there's no way to tell, as they don't tell us anything about its
capabilities other than some vague performance claims.
www.caustic.com
It's an add-in board designed for films studios, renderfarms and HPC
clusters meant to accelerate ray-tracing. They claim that, by using new
techniques rather than just parallelizing traditional algorithms,
they're able to get much better performance on secondary rays (which
kill current hardware methods, such as GPU accelerated raytracing).
According to Caustic, ray incoherence and branching are not a problem
for their solution (as it was designed specifically to deal with this
situation).
The current board, the Caustic One, is implemented using a couple of
FPGAs and 4GB of RAM. The next, the Caustic Two, will use specialized
chips designed for it rather than FPGAs, yielding yet another
performance increase (and possibly even more RAM).
The main issue I see is that they don't mention the precision of the
board, or what form the geometry takes. The board needs to support
double-precision to be truly useful, and geometry has to be more than
flat polygons. Of course, its possible that this information is
somewhere on their website and I just haven't dug around enough yet.
Integration with current systems shouldn't be *too* difficult, as they
use an extended version of OpenGL ES called CausticGL.
It's something to keep our eyes on.
--
...Chambers
www.pacificwebguy.com
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com> wrote: