"Man, if you could convince the Pope to get an abortion, you would make headlines everywhere. We could start calling him "Junior", otherwise."
- Benjamin M Strozykowski
Caustic Graphics, a startup from ex-Apple engineers, thinks their approach to 3D graphics—ray-tracing—will result in way more realistic eye candy than you see today, with chips that are 200x faster than today's by 2010. In a nutshell, ray tracing works by tracing rays (ta da!) or lines of light from a certain point through pixels in an image plane. It's hard to do, because it takes a lot of processing juju, with a fast processor that has a ton of cache memory. Nvidia and AMD are working on a hybrid approach that uses ray-tracing and rasterization (their current technique). Which makes sense in context of what Intel chief Craig Barrett told me at CES: "Everybody's kind of looking at the same thing, which is, 'How do I mix and match a CPU- and a GPU-type core, or six of these and two of those, and how do you have the software solution to go hand-in-hand?'" Right now, Caustic says they have a hardware and software setup that can zoomify ray-tracing 20x over today's hardware, and that by...
- Alastair Montgomery
Very interesting. I'm a big fan of all the ray-tracing demos and stuff.
- Benjamin M Strozykowski