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NVIDIA buys ray tracing specialist
Could this be bringing GPU-based ray tracing to a desktop near you?
Despite previously arguing that ray tracing is not the answer, NVIDIA is putting its money where its mouth isn’t and has just snapped up another company specialising in ray tracing. Just five months ago, NVIDIA acquired Mental Images, creator of the Mental Ray rendering engine used in a wide selection of professional 3D applications.
This time, NVIDIA has exerted its purchasing power on RayScale, which produces another professional ray tracing engine. RayScale’s LightNow plugs into Autodesk Maya to produce photorealistic 3D rendering and interactive ray-tracing. The latter sounds a lot like a real-time ray-tracing engine, as it provides a ‘fully responsive ray traced rendering window that updates to changes in the Maya model's geometry or materials,’ according to RayScale’s website.
Both these acquisitions have been focused on the professional market. The ray-tracing engines both companies produce are aimed at professional 3D content creation. However, one of NVIDIA’s aims with the acquisition of mental images was to move the Mental Ray renderer over to CUDA, its GPGPU interface for harnessing graphics power for tasks other than regular, rasterised 3D rendering.
NVIDIA has already ported PhysX over to CUDA, so its graphics cards will be able to calculate real-time physics on the GPU instead of the CPU or a dedicated card. The forthcoming GTX 260 and 280 will allegedly be the first consumer cards to run PhysX, although all NVIDIA GPUs since G80 have the requisite unified shader architecture to run it.
However, it could be a while before we see ray tracing on consumer desktops, as this will also require games developer support. That is likely to be some years away, especially with so much expertise invested in traditional 3D rendering technology. What is clear, though, is that NVIDIA sees the future threat from Intel’s burgeoning multi-core processors and Larrabee multi-core graphics looming ahead, and is strengthening its position.
To underline the power of its GPUs for tasks other than 3D, according to PC Perspective, NVIDIA has announced a client for Folding@Home. ATI’s GPU client is already very effective at Folding, and NVIDIA’s will be ‘incredibly fast’ on its GTX 260 and 280, although no figures have been quoted.
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l3v1ck - the purchase of both Mental and RayScale have nothing (on the surfae) to do with games - ray tracing a omplex image (1 frame) on even a high-end games machine takes 5mins-4hrs depending on resolution, effects, reflective surfaces, texture res etc. Rickykemp - Mental and RayScale are both software-derived ray-tracers meaning they will work with whatever hardware you have in your rig. However, Mental Ray & Mental Ray Satellite (which allows you to turn even your home network into a render farm) is now shipped as standard with most Autodesk products - 3DS MAX, Maya, Revit etc. So this seems to be more about 'software compatibility optimization' - meaning nVidia can release bits of software like PowerDraft, MAXtreme and Gelato so that professional software like AutoCAD and 3DS will work and render more efficiently and effectively (quicker) with nVidia's hardware then it would with Intel's. It's more about strengthening professional partnerships then gamers which if you look at the Quadro series and CUDA platform, makes perfect sense for the industries involved as well as bolstering the company's position in those fields - Professionals will hopefully choose nVidia hardware over others because of little optimizer programs which make the software work better - but that doesn't mean gamers won't see the benefits of all of this at some point down the road. After all most games are made using 3DS or Maya...
Comment by EdArch at 10:22pm 23rd May 2008
I also thought they might be doing that. Also, I wonder about the Folding@Home client. I'm selling my old X1950 Crossfire machine and now running an 8800GT OC, but I miss being able to crank up the folding speed with my GPU(s). This would be much welcomed, and be for the good of all in the folding community. Except maybe ATi, who have probably had a boost in sales since the F@H GPU client has been released, but I also question the validity of this claim - surely ATi have some sort of contract with Stanford Uni.
Comment by TWeaKoR at 10:07pm 23rd May 2008
that Mental Images is one of the leading ray tracers in the industry right? it wouldn't surprise if nVidia is cacking themselves, so have denied Intel access to such a valuable resource in buying them. they probably won't even use them.
Comment by rickykemp at 6:53pm 23rd May 2008
They aren't purely a gaming GPU manufacturer, y'know. What if they're working on porting ray tracing algorithms to CUDA on a Quadro or QuadroPlex?
Comment by woe2you at 6:30pm 23rd May 2008
I thought Nvidia recently said ray tracing wasn't the future of games? Why buy this company if that is the case. I think they're hedging their bets here. After all high end graphics is their thing, if they lose that to Intel.......
Comment by l3v1ck at 6:16pm 23rd May 2008
Whats going on in the labs of Nvidia... They dont even seem to have an idea of what they're doing anymore...
Comment by NikoBellic at 6:05pm 23rd May 2008
Sorry, Custom PC comments are now closed.
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