SIGGRAPH2009: Talking to NVidia
NVidia had a pretty good presence at SIGGRAPH, bolstered by the numerous press releases and announcements they’ve obviously been storing up to overwhelm attendees. A quick recap:
- NVidia’s New QuadroPlex Solutions
- NVidia’s new Realtime Ray-Tracking Engine, OptiX
- HP’s new Z800 Workstation with Dual NVidia Support
- Lowry Digital uses CUDA for Apollo11 Footage Restoration
And more, just look up VizWorld’s NVidia tag. We paid them a visit and sat down to talk about some of their stuff, and broke down the conversation for you after the break.
OptiX, Mental Images, and Caustic
One of the big announcements was a real-time ray-tracing system, named “OptiX” (pronounced ‘optex’, similar to ‘PhysX’ = ‘fizz-sexs’), that utilizes the GPU in the new CUDA-compliant cards to accelerate the process from mind-numbingly slow to real-time. They were demoing it in numerous locations throughout the booth, and the results were pretty good.
When talking to NVidia, I brought up the recent announcements from Caustic, makers of a dedicated real-time ray-tracing card, that integrate it with tools like Lightworks Artisan and Autodesk Showcase for high-quality realtime graphics. NVidia already owns Mental Images, creators of Mental Ray, a competing rendering engine for these products. It stands to reason that in an upcoming version of MentalRay there would be some type of pre-vis stage, based on OptiX, that would show your scene with a quality somewhere between the viewport (OpenGL or DirectX rasterization) & final output (full photon emission, physics based rendering). NVidia had no official comment on this, but did say they are working closely with Mental Images and their ‘iray’ technology. If you’ve never heard of ‘iray’, short for ‘incremental ray’, which is a faster mental-ray which approaches real-time.
In short, nothing official but it just plain makes sense. Unofficially, look for something in early 2010.
Paul Adams
VizWorld.com 