NVIDIA GPUs Accelerate Ray Tracing

By DE Editors

NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) will be accelerating a range of ray tracing solutions being demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2010, which is being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, July 27-29.

While ray tracing has been used in computer graphics for generating images with accuracy and realism, it requires more computation than alternative raster rendering approaches, and historically has been far slower as a result, according to NVIDIA.

The company says its newest GPUs, based upon its Fermi architecture, are driving ray traced applications orders of magnitude faster than quad-core CPUs.

“What used to be an excuse for a coffee break is now a real-time experience when running on NVIDIA’s newest GPUs,” says Jeff Brown, general manager Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. “The speed up is truly transformative for our customers — giving them interactive insight and dramatically enhancing their creative process in ways that have not been possible on individual workstations before.”

Companies demonstrating ray tracing solutions running on NVIDIA GPUs at SIGGRAPH include:

• mental images, showing iray interactive rendering, using CUDA C, at the NVIDIA booth (#717)
• NVIDIA, showing OptiX interactive examples, using CUDA C, at the NVIDIA booth
• Bunkspeed, showing SHOT with interactive iray, at the NVIDIA booth
• Lightworks, showing Artisan, using CUDA C and OptiX, at the Lightworks booth (#225)
• Works Zebra, showing Zeany, using CUDA C and OptiX, at the NVIDIA booth
• cebas Visual Technology Inc., showing Final Render, using CUDA C, at the cebas booth (#314)
• Refractive Software, showing the Octane Renderer, using CUDA C, at the Cubix Corp. booth (#1126)
• Chaos Software Ltd., showing V-Ray GPU, using OpenCL, at the Chaos booth (#313)

At SIGGRAPH 2010, NVIDIA is also presenting two technical papers, “OptiX: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine,” and “PantaRay: Directional Occlusion for Fast Cinematic Lighting of Massive Scenes.” Additionally, NVIDIA is sponsoring a developer session, “Rapid GPU Ray Tracing Development with NVIDIA OptiX.”

For more information, visit NVIDIA’s SIGGRAPH page.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company's website.