CNet News has the story of a new startup named “Caustic” that’s attempting to build dedicated real-time Ray Tracing hardware. This isn’t a new claim, but they seem to actually have some hardware to do the job already:
The company says its software and chips allow graphics chips to carry out ray-tracing calculations at a 20-fold speed-up compared with existing PC hardware. It said it expects to deliver chips by early 2010 that will be about 200 times faster.
In a demonstration, Caustic executives manipulated a photo-quality image of a sports car, removing components and changing lighting and background settings to change reflections on the vehicle’s surface.
via Start-up Caustic targets ray tracing for graphics | Business Tech – CNET News.
