CausticOne and the Initial Strategy
Out of the gate, Caustic isn't going after gaming. They aren't even going after the consumer market. Which, we think, it quite a wise move. Ageia showed very clearly the difficulty that can be experienced in trying to get support for a hardware feature that is not widely adopted into games. Game developers only have so many resources and they can't spend their time on aspects of game programming that completely ignore the vast majority of their users. Thus, the target for the first hardware will be in film, video and other offline rendering or simulation areas.
The idea isn't to displace the CPU or the GPU in rendering or even raytracing specifically, but to augment and assist them in an application where rays need to be cast and evaluated.
The CausticOne is a board built using FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) and 4GB of RAM. Two of the FPGAs (the ones with heatsinks on them) make up SIMD processing units that handle evaluation of rays. We are told that the hardware provides about a 20x speedup over modern CPU based raytracing algorithms. And since this hardware can be combined with CPU based raytracing techniques, this extra speed is added on top of the speed current rendering systems already have. Potentially, we could integrate processing with CausticOne into GPU based raytracing techniques, but this has not yet been achieved. Certainly, if a single PC could make use of CPU, GPU and raytracing processor, we would see some incredible performance.
Caustic Graphics didn't go into much detail on the processor side of things, as they don't want to give away their special sauce. We know it's SIMD, and we know that it is built to handle secondary incoherent rays very efficiently. One of the difficulties in building a fast raytracing engine is that as you look at deeper and deeper bounces of light, we find less coherence between rays that have been traced back from the eye. Essentially, the more bounces we look at the more likely it is that rays near each other will diverge.
Speeding up raytracing on traditional hardware requires building packets of rays to shoot. In packets with high coherence, we see a lot of speed up because we reuse a lot of the work we do. Caustic Graphics tells us that their hardware makes it possible to shoot single rays without using packets and without hurting performance. Secondary incoherent rays also don't show the same type of performance degradation we see on CPUs and especially GPUs.
The CausticOne has a huge amount of RAM on board because, unlike with the GPU, the entire scene needs to be fully maintained in the memory of the card in order to maintain performance. Every ray shot needs to be checked against all the geometry in a scene, and then secondary rays shot from the first intersection need to have information about every other object and light source. With massive amounts of RAM and two FPGAs, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Caustic Graphics' hardware must be very fast at branching and very adept at computing rays once they've been traced back to an object.
Development is ongoing, and the CausticOne is slated to go to developers and those who run render farms. This will not be an end user product, but will be available to those who could have a use for it now (like movie studios with render farms or in High Performance Computing (HPC, or big iron) systems). Developers of all kinds will also have access to the hardware in order to start developing for it now before the consumer version hits the streets.
Their business model will be service and support for those who want and need it with CausticOne. Caustic Graphics has extended OpenGL ES 2.0 with GLSL to include support for shooting rays from shaders. They hope that their extensions will eventually become part of OpenGL, which may actually be useful in the future especially if hybrid rasterizing and raytracing rendering engines start to take off. They went with the ES spec, as it's less encumbered by legacy elements present in OpenGL.
On top of OpenGL ES 2.0 with Caustic's extensions, developers can use the CausticRender package which is a higher level set of tools designed on top CausticGL (which is what they're calling their extended GL API). This allows developers to either dig down to the low level or start writing engines more intuitively. There are more tools that Caustic is working on, and they do hope to see content creation ISVs and others start building their own tools as well. They want to make it easy for anyone who already has a raytracing engine to port their software to a hardware accelerated version, and they also want people who need to render raytraced scenes to have software that can take advantage of their hardware.
Focusing on developers and render farms first is a great way to go, as it sort of mirrors the way NVIDIA used the HPC space to help get CUDA exposure. There are applications out there that never have enough power, and offering something that can provide an order of magnitude speed up is very attractive in that space. Getting software support in the high end content creation and rendering packages would definitely help get Caustic noticed and possibly enable them to trickle down into more consumer oriented markets. But that brings us to next year and the CausticTwo.
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DeathBooger - Wednesday, April 22, 2009 - link
They're speaking in terms of workstation hours, not actual hours. HP is hyping their products so it is misleading.Roland00 - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - link
So each frame took about (94*60*30=169,200 frames)Thus each final frame took 236.40 hours of render time.
Verdant - Monday, April 20, 2009 - link
I respectfully disagree, a fully raytraced scene with anything more than basic lighting can easily take well over a minute per frame, even if you have a huge render farm, it takes a long time to render an animation of any significant length and detail. Most larger animation houses would jump on something like this, if it really can render their frames 20x faster, and not use 20x the power.jabber - Monday, April 20, 2009 - link
....that still cant show anything but a rendered image of its product several months after its been announced.Tuvok86 - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - link
the card picturedhttp://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/694/card-angle...">http://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/694/card-angle...
monomer - Monday, April 20, 2009 - link
Is it just me, or does the Caustic logo look similar to a slightly rotated Quake III logo?SonicIce - Monday, April 20, 2009 - link
lol yea. except its like quake 6 or somethingssj4Gogeta - Monday, April 20, 2009 - link
If raytracing catches on in games, how long will it take Intel to make similar units and put a couple of them on the Larrabee die? I'm sure if they could do it, Intel's scientists too.Besides, from what I've seen/read, it seems Larrabee will be good enough for raytracing. In a Larrabee research paper from Intel I read that Larrabee is 4.6 times more efficient than Intel Xeon (Core based) processors in raytracing on a per clock, per core basis. Also, Intel ray traced quake war at around 25 fps @1280x720 using 4 Intel Dunnington hexa-core processors (24 cores in total).
So if Larrabee will have 32 cores, and even if we take it to be 4x more efficient instead of 4.6 (scaling etc.) then it will be (32*4)/24 = around 5.5 times faster than the setup they used. That's enormous! 130 fps at 1280x720 res for a fully ray traced game!, or you could increase the res and keep the fps to 60. Besides, Larrabee will most likely have MUCH more bandwidth available than that FSB based Dunnington system had.
I can't wait, Intel. Hurry up!
lopri - Monday, April 20, 2009 - link
Interesting article. Thank you for the explanation on Ray Tracing v. Rasterization. The difference is still confusing to me, but hopefully I'll eventually understand. I don't expect a simple answer to my questions but maybe someone can enlighten me.1. Doesn't Ray-Tracing still require triangles anyway? I understand Rasterazation as Derek explained: draw triangles and 'flatten' them. Ray-tracing shoots (?) rays on triangles. So it still needs triangles anyway. It sounds more like shooting rays on 'flattened' triangles.. Oh but what do I know.
2. Is there any 'fundemental' reason why Ray-traced images look better than rasterized images? It seems to me they're just different ways for a same result. Yes, I'm a noob.
Anyway, I agree with others regarding this specific company. It's proably applying some patents and then looking to be bought by bigger fishes. Do they even have a working hardware?
DerekWilson - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - link
1) You can do raytracing without triangles -- you can just use math to describe your objects like spheres and stuff as all that's really needed is an intersection point. But you can also use triangles, and this is often what is done because it does still make some things easier. You just do intersection between a line and a plane and see if the intersection point falls inside your triangle. So -- for rasterization, triangles are required while for raytracing they are perfectly fine to use but you aren't as locked in to using them as with rasterizers.2) because each pixel can contain input from more of the rest of the scene with little programatic complexity and a high degree of accuracy. it is possible for raytracing to produce a more accurate image /faster/ than rasterization would require to achieve an equally accurate image. however, it is possible for rasterization to produce an image that is "close enough" MUCH faster than raytracing (especially with modern hardware acceleration).
...
there are some raytraced images that look very bad but accurately portray reflection and refraction. accuracy in rendering isn't all that's required for a good looking image. The thing that is being rendered also needs to be handled well by artists -- accurate textures and materials need to be developed and used correctly or the rendered image will still look very bad. I think this is why a lot of raytracing proof of concepts use solid colored glass even when they don't have to. I honestly don't think the sample images Caustic provided are very "good" looking, but they do show off good effects (reflection, refraction, caustics, ambient occlusion, soft shadows ...) ...
so ... I could take a diamond and try cutting it myself. I could put this diamond on a table next to a really well cut cubic zirconium. people might think the imitation looks much better and more "diamond" like in spite of the fact that my horribly cut diamond is a diamond ... which one is "better" is different than which one is more "accurate" ... both are good though :-)
hope that helps ...