It seems that NVIDIA might have found a way to stand up to Intel and all of the talk about raytracing, even though it was so fast to dismiss Intel there. A lot of the early talk on Larrabee was about its potential as a raytracer, but it's been clarified that it will also rasterize pixels, in fact that's the main purpose. In any case, it seems that NVIDIA is acquiring some expertise in the raytracing area by acquiring start-up company RayScale.
Utah-based RayScale consists of a number of people from the University of Utah and has been around for about ten years now. It's main product is for Autodesk Maya and is called LightNow. It uses interactive raytracing to render photo-realistic 3D images. RayScale is still in the beta stage (v0.9), but offers a number of interesting features according to the website;
- Lambert, Phong, PhongE, Blinn, and Anisotropic materials
- Maya lights
- Fully responsive ray traced rendering window that updates to changes in the Maya model's geometry or materials
- Integration with Maya Rendering window
- Simple ray tracing
- Global illumination
- HDR rendering
- Environment mapping
Version 1.0 (if there will be one now that NVIDIA is coming in) will also contain the following after its release in 2008:
- Caustics
- RayScale advanced shaders
NVIDIA has shown little interest in raytracing before this, claiming it was first of all too slow for game implementation, but that it could be useful in certain scenarios, without specifying which. So now that both Intel and NVIDIA have acknowledged raytracing, one can't help wondering what AMD is up to.
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NVIDIA gets into raytracing?
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