Ray Tracing

Foundry teases Katana 4.0

The Foundry’s Katana is a powerful tool for lighting and look development. Compared to so many tools used in entertainment content creation, it is a relatively young application. Foundry added Katana to its portfolio in 2011 through a deal with Sony Imageworks to package and further develop the portfolio of tools developed by Imageworks to handle lighting and look development. … Read more

The hot GPU chips

I didn’t have to drive one and a half hours each way to hear and see the GPU presentations at Hot Chips this year, something I will be eternally grateful for. I did miss getting to see some of my friends, but I see many of them on Zoom calls anyway. The air didn’t get any more polluted and my … Read more

Is ray tracing catching on?

Source: Francis Damm   It was late July 2018, when Nvidia surprised and delighted the world with the introduction of its RTX GPU that could deliver real-time ray tracing, dubbed RTRT. If you build it, will they come? It was a gamble. Nvidia had to not only design and manufacture the chip, but they also had to build a toolset … Read more

Minecraft with Nvidia’s ray tracing GPU and RTX

Nvidia offered a sneak peek at what is possible when the world’s most popular game employs ray tracing technology. The company is also offering some tutorials to help Minecrafters get started using ray tracing in their constructions. The company said they have been working with some of the world’s most talented creators in the Minecraft community in preparation for the … Read more

OEMs launch 100+ laptop designs with GeForce GPUs

(Source: Asus)   Nvidia, Intel, and over 100 notebook OEMs introduce new, powerful, and affordable devices just in time to support the work-at-home mandates of the COVID-19 crisis. Intel announced the long-anticipated 10th gen H Core i7 mobile CPU with improved power management and 5G capability. Nvidia introduced the GeForce RTX 2080 Super and 2070 Super GPUs for laptops. The … Read more

The road to Sony’s PS5

An ultra-high-speed SSD, with an integrated custom I/O system, a custom AMD GPU with ray tracing, and a highly immersive 3D audio processor. Mark Cerny, the lead system architect for the upcoming PS5, gave a virtual presentation called The Road to PS5 and revealed the main features of Sony’s future console. The new console will have three major features: a … Read more

Ray tracing in next gen Xbox AND PS5

Reports from sites and bloggers, reliable and otherwise,  have been swirling since October that Sony’s next-gen PS5 will support ray tracing using an AMD custom VPU. That small, basic bit of information was also confirmed at a press briefing at the end of January by AMD project manager Mithun Chandrashekhar, who said, “RDNA 2, the next-gen, will support raytracing. Both … Read more

Foundry Katana gets significant overhaul

Katana, Foundry’s professional lighting and look development software is a powerful tool developed for cinematic and video production teams. As a procedural, asset-based tool, Katana enables people on a project to work with specific elements of a scene without interfering with each other’s work. True to the Foundry’s workflow approach, Katana relies on a node-graph, which is akin to creating … Read more

Real-time ray tracing on Huawei smartphone

NetEase, founded in June 1997 and based in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China, is an Internet company providing online services. At the 2019 Software Green Alliance Developers Conference held recently, NetEase showed the results of realtime ray tracing technology in mobile games and used Love Is Justice mobile game to demonstrate. The company showed the first public demonstration of mobile gaming applications … Read more