January 25th, 2012
Published by: VR-Zone
After all, OpenRT and Brazil are open SDK’s and follow the mantra of “Citus Altis Fortus” (Faster, Stronger).
Intel graphics to challenge NVIDIA, AMD in CAD pro space? Source: http://vr-zone.com/articles/intel-graphics-to-challenge-nvidiaamd-in-cad-pro-space-/14613.html January 25th, 2012
Even in the current Sandy Bridge generation, Intel processors don't really compete against discrete 3-D cards when it comes to heavy duty 3-D gaming or multimedia creation tasks. The shader, texture, pixel and effects processing capabilities were never even intended for that. What about one even more lucrative yet more stable market over the decades - the 3-D CAD for engineers and architects, for instance? Last year, Imagination Technologies acquired Caustic Graphics, a small start-up company out of San Francisco which was working hard on creating an accelerator that would make real-time ray-tracing a reality. The company managed to create two generations of products which were more technology demonstrators than anything else, but their FPGA chips worked.
Well, have a good look at the contents of a large 3-D building or city model compared to a complex environment simulated within a modern 3-D game.
Following the acquisition, Caustic continued working hard on building commercial purpose for its technology and on CES 2012, we managed to see the birth of commercialization. By using OpenRL Brazil 3.0 software dev kits (SDK), Imagination Technologies are in the final stages of bringing a real-time raytracing accelerator card to market.
While talking to representatives of both Caustic and Imagination Technologies, we were told that the card is set to be introduced in the second half of this year, with the goal being Siggraph 2012. Given that for example, Quadro and Tesla units represent bread and butter at NVIDIA, and that the company is virtually unchallenged with their mentalray software and Tesla hardware - there could be plenty of room for a second player. If AMD turns focus on their FirePro line of products, maybe even a third challenger appears.
In the city or building case, basically you got a lot of polygons, as even curved buildings defined by NURBS at the end get broken into that. Depending on the level of detail involved, a typical 50-storey building with some actual facade design effort put into it, like beautiful Art Deco style towers popping up in China or Malaysia, may take anywhere between 500,000 and 10 million polygons in total. There would likely be no more than 10 different texture types for the outside facade, and another few dozen at most for the interior, if that one is included at the initial modeling stage at all. Look at CapitaLand's Chaotianmen project in Chongqing, a site the author is very familiar with, as a good example of maximum complexity 3-D building model, whose 8 towers with skybridge and coastal modeling of two rivers' confluence could take even 20 million polygons - still nothing compared to the most complex game scenes when all stuff is turned on. If, on the other hand, we use some of our Singaporean 'quickie boring design to maximise early profits' approach like the 50storey One Raffles Quay, for instance, resulting in an ugly box, you can do the whole thing precisely in just 50 polygons plus a very, very simple flat texture - something even an early
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