Caustic Series 2 Ray Tracing Hardware released

[Kojack]

I just got an email from Imagination Technologies (makers of the PowerVR chip used in a large chunk of mobile devices) that the Caustic 2 RTU (Ray Tracing Unit) has started shipping.
There's two models available: the R2100 single RTU card with 4GB ram for $795 and the R2500 dual RTU card with 16GB ram for $1495.

The cards come with a free license for the Caustic Visualizer for Maya, which provides a real time raytraced viewport mode.

The Caustic RTU supports OpenRL (Imagination Technologies opengl inspired api, not to be confused with OpenRT used by Saarland University's SaarCOR RPU (the one used to ray trace Quake 4 years ago)).

No texturing is performed on the card. It's ram is for storing the complete scene geometry which it then does ray tracing on. The host cpu is used for the rest of the rendering pipeline.

Interesting, I wonder how rendering focused it will remain? Could there be a GPGPU equivalent on the RTU? There's a lot of uses for fast ray tracing (effectively ray casting against a triangle soup) such as physics, ai and visibility determination.

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