Tony DeYoung frequently extolls the virtues of MachStudio Pro on his FireUser.com blog, and points to a review of the product on Renderosity which contains a few tidbits of what we’ll see in the upcoming new version:
- Raytracing using DX11 Compute Shaders – “I had a first-hand demonstration of what looks to be the first DirectX 11 “compute shade” raytracing prototype, which looked fantastic. I believe Yoni told me that this will be the first time raytracing will be applied using the GPU only.”
- Hair – “anything you can do in ‘Shave and a Haircut’ you can do in MachStudio Pro's hair mode.
While I’m happy to see some nice GPU-accelerated raytracing support, I’m disappointed to see it based entirely on the DirectX11 Compute systems. This means that you won’t be seeing a Linux or Mac version of MachStudio anytime soon (no DirectX support), and that you won’t be using it on Windows XP or Windows Vista either.
I think it’s not a huge stretch to take an engine written in DX11 Compute Shader and port to OpenCL. This kind of thing can happen in a relatively short amount of time and I doubt Studio GPU will leave out Linux and Mac support for much longer.