Nvidia shows GPU-based ray tracing engine

 

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By Darien Graham-Smith in San Jose

Posted on 30 Sep 2009 at 21:41

Nvidia has demonstrated a new ray tracing engine that runs natively on the company's GPUs. The technology was announced by president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in his opening keynote of the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference in San Jose.

The new engine is a pre-emptive riposte to Intel's Larrabee, which is designed to perform ray tracing in real time. Intel's hardware is, however, still under development, and the first Larrabee demonstration at IDF last week showed only a simple looped scene running at a comparatively slow frame rate.

Interactive graphics, not gaming

Nvidia's ray tracing demonstration ran even more slowly than Larrabee, taking around 15 seconds to fully render a high-resolution image of a sports car using reflective and translucent textures with global illumination. There was no suggestion that the technology might be usable for gaming any time soon.

But as Huang pointed out, the engine's performance still represents around a forty-fold speed improvement over current CPU-based approaches, and opens the door to interactive photo-realistic design on mainstream GPUs.

"This is the type of image you would see people render for an architecture design, an advertisement for a car, maybe even to create a movie reel for an advertisement," explained Huang.

"You would never try to do something like this interactively - until today."

"And this is running on our last generation GPU," he teased. "I can’t wait to see it on our next-generation GPU."