POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.programming : This might actually prove useful... Server Time
29 Mar 2024 00:42:13 EDT (-0400)
  This might actually prove useful... (Message 1 to 2 of 2)  
From: Chambers
Subject: This might actually prove useful...
Date: 20 Apr 2009 21:33:11
Message: <49ed2257$1@news.povray.org>
...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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From: clipka
Subject: Re: This might actually prove useful...
Date: 21 Apr 2009 03:10:01
Message: <web.49ed70f6ca4e79cc2cc277220@news.povray.org>
Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
> Integration with current systems shouldn't be *too* difficult, as they
> use an extended version of OpenGL ES called CausticGL.

Sounds very much like triangles-only.


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