Nvidia to buy RayScale, a ray tracing developing company

[Sound_Card]

If true, would seem Nvidia actually has a soft spot for ray tracing. Kind of funny considering all the garbage they spewed about it. Or perhaps it's for damage control or to help better meet DX11 spec which is to have some form of ray tracing support.

PC Perspective is reporting Nvidia will be acquiring RayScale, a ray tracing software company. An official announcement is expected in the next few days if not sooner.
According the RayScale’s website the company “provides ray tracing photo-realistic solutions,” and makes products for Autodesk Maya that utilizes a hybrid rendering technique. No other details were revealed about the acquisition or how Nvidia will be utilizing RayScale’s expertise.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvi...abee,5458.html

[razor1]

please like when they bought mental ray, ya know thats a raytrace renderer too.

They never spewed garbage out either. Raytracing is not feesible for all situations in real time right now that is fact, if it takes 45 mins to render one frame with FG and GI on a dual quad core 3.0 ghz system then to do that in real time we would need a system that is 81000 times faster then those CPU's. We won't have that for along time.

[Sound_Card]

I'm not one of the ray tracing is the tomorrow fanatics either. So don't get me wrong. What I do see is hybrid approches in the future.

[razor1]

hybrid approaches are already being used but its going to take a very long time for anything close to what we see texture based approaches we use today to do them with raytracing.

I wouldn't be suprised if this is for building an off line raytracer for 3d modellers on a GPU instead of a CPU.

[Sound_Card]

Originally Posted by nAo

I heard nvidia formed a new ray tracing group a few months ago and as I already pointed out in another post Phillip Slusallek is now working for them.

Interesting...

[acroig]

Nice find, S_C.

[ChrisRay]

Uhh Nvidia actually supports raytracing. Just not as a sole source of rendering. Hybrid styles of raster/ray where raytracing does specific expensive effects.

[Nunz]

Jesus, nvidia is snatching up companies alot lately, wow

[mynakedrat2]

so is nvidia mad at intel?

[jolle]

Originally Posted by mynakedrat2

so is nvidia mad at intel?

Well they dont agree with abandoning rasterising entirely for raytracing for realtime 3d graphics.
You can use both, just as in for example Maya Software renderer, its a rasterizer but you can do raytraced shadows and stuff like that, reflections.

This aquisition might be aiming at the workstation segment tho, as already mentioned they bought Mental Images that make the popular Mental Ray renderer that plugs into most 3d packages.
Im assuming they are gonna put in CUDA support to offload parts of the render process to a DX10 GPU, should really speed things up with modern GPUs seing how parallell they are and what high clocks the SP units run.

Rayscale isnt really doing any realtime raytracing by the look of it, their software is a plugin for Maya, interactive rendering but still, that prolly just mean you can update certain aspects of the rendering at will.
So Im guessing NV wants to tie CUDA into that aswell, all to make the Quadros more attractive on that market I spose.

[ChrisRay]

I really do not think Intel's aim is to replace raster either completely. But go a hybrid approach. Developers simply arent ready for full blown raytracing. Nor do they event want it.

[jolle]

Originally Posted by ChrisRay

I really do not think Intel's aim is to replace raster either completely. But go a hybrid approach. Developers simply arent ready for full blown raytracing. Nor do they event want it.

Yeah in reality they arent expecting everyone to jump over to full raytracing overnight, hardware, APIs and game engines in one go.
The hybrid approach which is what offline rendering is doing today, is the only realistic way to go really and as you say they must be well aware of this.

They way they came out touting raytracing as the future prolly made it sound a bit like they intended to move over entirely, rather then have it as another tool in the toolbox of realtime graphics.
And possibly they wanted people to get that impression, since Intel + GPU leaves a bit of a sour taste in the mouth, but when they claim to "reinvent" realtime graphics with a rendering method more accociated with CPU:s, IE their domain, saying rasterizing has reached its limits and all that jazz, It makes you thing of something other then the crapfest ultra lowend GPUs they´ve poluted the market with to date.

[acroig]

Anth, I'm glad you saved me the trouble of deleting those last two posts.

[Anth Seebel]

Yeah, Im not even going to get into the AMD bias BS.

[acroig]