As most of you know I love ray tracing, even just wrote a book about it (comes out Siggraph time). So, I was thrilled when at last year’s Siggraph Nvidia showed their Turing architecture and promised real-time ray tracing for all. I wasn’t the only one thrilled as enthusiasts and developers bought out all Nvidia had to sell. Then the … Read more
One, JPR has just released the definitive report on the ray tracing market and its 70 software and three hardware providers: The Global Market for Ray Tracing Software Two, Nvidia will be presenting 21 sessions on ray tracing at their GTC conference in San Jose from the 18th to the 22nd of March, 2019: GPU Technology Conference Ray tracing and the advent … Read more
Epic was the first company to demonstrate ray tracing using Microsoft’s new DRX API and Nvidia’s RTX technology at SIGGRAPH. They did that at GDC 2018 with a home-made movie using some of George Lucas’ stormtroopers who had the day off and nothing else to do. Actually, the experiment was created in collaboration with ILMxLAB. Careful you don’t slip on … Read more
Several companies offer a ray tracing plug-in for SketchUp, but Trimble calls this one the “premier renderer for SketchUp.” After more than four years of R&D, V-Ray Next accelerates the SketchUp workflow, and according to Chaos Group, the SketchUp plug-in offers massive speed and intelligence enabling designers to produce better renders faster. Chaos says V-Ray Scene Intelligence can now automatically … Read more
Further evidence that AMD is at the top of its game came with the company’s keynote at CES this year. The company took a keynote spot for the first time while Intel let the opportunity pass. CES CEO Gary Shapiro, who seems to be ageless, introduced Lisa Su, and couldn’t have done a better job if he had worked for … Read more
Forest animation rendered in realtime with Chaos’ new Lavina technology. The scene has over 300 billion triangles and 80,000 instances running at 24–30 frames per second with no rasterized graphics or reduced level of detail as might be used for game engine rendering. In this case, the render was performed on Nvidia’s Quadro RTX GPUs. Chaos Group showcased its new … Read more
Streaming game services like GeForce Now change the equation for the computer industry and enable AAA gaming on everything from
Every year, Futuremark, now part of UL Labs and simply known as “UL,” added new benchmark tests to its iconic 3DMark. Each test was designed for a specific class of hardware or a particular API. Since 2013, they’ve added tests that use DirectX 12, tests that run at 4K, tests for notebooks, tablets, and smartphones, as well as new features … Read more
Siemens has announced the acquisition of Lightwork Design of Sheffield, England. Lightwork began life as an OEM provider of rendering software to many CAD companies including Autodesk, PTC, Siemens, and Dassault at one time or another. The company did not make products that sold directly to customers. Lightwork Design supplied rendering technology to Siemens for over twenty years. The company … Read more
As we try to mitigate our excitement in the run up to Siggraph, which can only be compared to the weeks before Christmas, subtle hints and leaks are dribbling out of some of the exhibitors and paper presenters as they employ guerilla marketing techniques to vie for big(er) headlines when the actual event happens. Announcements from Pixar, Intel, Microsoft, Nvidia, … Read more
Gaming is still the major cash cow for the company and they haven’t forgotten that By design, the Nvidia GTC had very little gaming content but they did display a few products and technologies worthy of mention. BFGD Just when we thought we had everything properly segmented; Nvidia goes off the reservation and breaks all the rules with the “TV … Read more
Nvidia demonstrated real-time raytracing at GDC and again at GTC using their DGX station super computer through the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API. That system provides a theoretical compute capability of over 63 TFLOPS for the total system, of which about 62 TFLOPS were used for the ray tracing. So a threshold or benchmark of sorts has been established for what … Read more
