We’ve talked about Caustic Graphics and their impressive CausticOne card before, but I missed when they announced OpenRL.  OpenRL is a freely-available cross-platform Ray Tracing API that runs independent of their impressive hardware, allowing you to implement hardware accelerated (or software emulated) ray tracing on a wide variety of systems. Over on Vimeo they have this great example of the system running on a MacBook Pro with the GeForce 9400M.

This technical example demonstrates OpenRL’s heterogeneous computing ability by leveraging a Macbook Pro’s Intel Core 2 Duo processor, together with an NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor to solve the ray tracing problem. Essentially whichever device is ready to do more work then OpenRL will assign more rays to it. The result is the fastest performance of ray tracing on a laptop today.

Of course, don’t take this to mean they aren’t working on their hardware cards anymore, they most certainly are.  This way they just have an open API that everyone can use whether they have the Caustic card or not.  It’s somewhat like the Freemium model:  Get Brazil (or some other OpenRL enabled app) and try it on your GTX480, and be amazed.  Then once you’re hooked, fork out the extra cash for the Caustic card and be blown away.

via OpenRL™ Heterogeneous Computing Example on Vimeo.