New GFX company enters the fight.

It's been a while since a PC graphics company has made a big challenge to the big Three (Intel, Nvidia, ATI) in terms of supporting games. The last such company was 3dfx who championed the 3 acceleration movement in the late 1990s but couldn't keep up the pace and was sold to Nvidia.

Today a new company called Caustic Graphics has officially announced its presence with claims that their PC graphics product will be able to out perform current solutions by up to 20 times. It also claims that their second-generation product, due out in early 2010, will have 200 times (and that's not a typo) the performance of current solutions. Caustic Graphics will base their graphics product on raytracing, a graphics technique that allows for highly realistic looking 3D graphics. Raytracing has also proven to have issues with performance in the past but Caustic claims their technology "enables highly parallel CPUs and GPUs to massively-accelerate raytracing, putting it on par with rasterization and resulting in cinema-quality 3D delivered interactively on low-cost PCs."

The San Fransisco-based Caustic plans to reveal more info about their first product in April 2009. At the moment they are targeting high end computing needs but we suspect that PC gaming is also in their plans.

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MadDog56 said:

Wow another GPGPU concept, how exactly are cuda and larrabee doing these days? That's right, they are vaporware as far as the end user is concerned.

Intel is only relevant because they throw the absolute worst graphics in the business on so many of their own chipsets. Other than that no one is buying an intel card. ATI struggled and was bought out by AMD, Nvidia is fighting frantically to keep physx alive. I agree that slapping two sets of hardware on the same pcb or just stuffing as many cards as you can fit into a case is not progress, but I expect nothing less than an industry wide belly flop by Caustic Graphics.

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AstaLaVista said:

This sounds like the modem wars when they all claimed their modem could hit 56K speeds but the isp were only able to provide 2400 baud rates :D

All in all, as long as it doesn't cost me a mortgage payment for one of this new cards, I am all for it, in the end though... it is pretty much Greek to me

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Everlong18 said:

MadDog56 said:

Wow another GPGPU concept, how exactly are cuda and larrabee doing these days? That's right, they are vaporware as far as the end user is concerned.

Intel is only relevant because they throw the absolute worst graphics in the business on so many of their own chipsets. Other than that no one is buying an intel card. ATI struggled and was bought out by AMD, Nvidia is fighting frantically to keep physx alive. I agree that slapping two sets of hardware on the same pcb or just stuffing as many cards as you can fit into a case is not progress, but I expect nothing less than an industry wide belly flop by Caustic Graphics.

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How is CUDA vapourware? It's been out for quite some time. And how are Nvidia frantically trying to keep Physx alive?

CUDA is capable of ray tracing NVISION08: Interactive Ray Tracing like what Gunther's already said.

It doesn't really mean much this though. It's just like saying "I can offer you a cable connection 10x faster than your current DSL connection". It just seems Caustic think Ray Tracing is the sum of photo realistic rendering. It's all well and good saying, "In 2010, it will be 200x faster than what we have now", but Nvidia and ATI still have to release their DX11 cards, even thought MS aren't supporting Ray Tracing for a while yet.

I'll be impressed with it doing photon mapping of a 20million polygon scene at 4k resolution at 60fps.

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