NVIDIA does real-time raytracing

	NVIDIA does real-time raytracing
	[ Hardware News ] posted by Duke on Monday, August 18, 2008 5:57 PM
	NVIDIA: hot on Intel's heels!
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Without any doubt, raytracing is the new buzzword down in visual computing avenue. Not that it's anything new... raytracing has been with us for years... but because the cuttinge edge of technology has just started producing the first good results at real-time raytracing.

Just a couple of months ago, Intel impressed us by revealing some of its progress in the field of raytracing. Now, NVIDIA, as if to make itself heard, has revealed its own work on raytracing, which has been recently demonstrated at this year's SIGGRAPH conference.

At SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA presented what it claimed to be « the world's first fully interactive GPU-based ray tracer ». NVIDIA ran a demo application demonstrating a complex scene being rendered in real-time using raytracing. The two million polygon scene depicted a highly polished Bugatti Veyron sporting the NVIDIA colors, as well as its surrounding urban environment.

Using only an NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System, NVIDIA managed to keep up 30 frames per second when rendering to a 1920 x 1080 resolution display. NVIDIA also ran the demo application at a resolution of 2560 x 1600, but chose not to disclose the framerate acheived in this case. The NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 boasts no less than four Quadro GPUs, each with 1GB of memory, and would set you back about $11,000.

The NVIDIA Quadro Plex D4

SOURCE: Custom PC News