Caustic Graphics: Hardware Raytracing

CausticTwo, the Long Term, and Preliminary Thoughts

Looking toward the future, Caustic Graphics will bring out the CausticTwo next year. The major differences with this hardware will be with the replacement of the FPGAs with ASICs (application specific integrated circuit - a silicon chip like a CPU or a GPU). This will enable an estimated additional 14x performance improvement as ASICs can run much much faster than FPGAs. We could also see more RAM on board as well. This would bring the projected performance to over 200x the speed of current CPU based raytracing performance.

Of course, next year CPUs will be faster, but based on that kind of projection we are still looking at about two orders of magnitude more performance than CPU based algorithms. This means that instead of seconds per frame, we can start talking about frames per second. Unless we want even more photorealistic images. That will still take a very long time.

The CausticTwo will also be available to end users. Hopefully by this time raytraceing plugins for 3D Studio Max, Maya, and all the other content creation tools that some prosumers and students dabble in will be hardware accelerated on Caustic Graphics hardware. And maybe at this point we'll start to see some realtime raytracing engine demos. Maybe.

Planting their flag firmly in film, video and advanced visualization markets makes the most sense and holds the most potential for long term viability. Jumping completely into games won't be the best way to go at this point -- it needs to be either a gradual adoption or they need to get their hardware into future game consoles. Pushing PC gaming before console adoption will likely prove as just as difficult for Caustic as it did for Ageia, and might not be the best use of resources. Especially if they can cut out a niche in the higher end space.

But they do have their eye on games at some point and are already talking about game consoles. While hardware, service and support for render farms, large scale visualization and those who need the hyper-realism that raytracing can offer has the potential to create a sustainable business, conceiving a piece of hardware that becomes nearly required for gaming (like the GPU) would be the holy grail in this case. It's not likely, but you can bet it's at the back of their mind. Staying focused on more modest goals is definitely a better way to stay in business though.

But they could go another direction. They could try and get themselves acquired by a 3rd party like Ageia did. Of course, NVIDIA killed Ageia's hardware business, and it would be nice if Caustic's hardware technology survived any acquisition. But that is often times how these things go. We'll simply have to wait and see.

There is another factor looming on the horizon as well. As we mentioned earlier, raytracing is very branch heavy, memory dependent and compute heavy. It's a beast of an algorithm that seems to always have a bottleneck no matter what it is running on. Though it will still be a while before we have hardware, Larrabee might just as well be a solution to the raytracing option. The Larrabee architecture tries to blend some of the CPU and GPU approach to processing, and the hybrid may enable a platform that competes with Caustic when it hits the scene. Memory organization and size are probably still going to favor Caustic, but we've continually heard rumblings that raytracing on Larrabee will be where it's at. It will certainly be interesting to compare the two approaches when they both arrive.

Beyond Larrabee, the long term plan for many core CPUs could include application specific processors. We will see combined CPUs and GPUs in the near future, and maybe we'll see dedicated raytracing units integrated as one or more of the many cores on a CPU down the road. The really long term picture is a bit more fuzzy, but they've got short term potential in the markets that need all the power they can get.

For now, we don't have hardware and we don't have developer feedback either. Caustic is going to get us a copy of their SDK so we can play around with it a bit and evaluate it. But as for knowing how applicable or useful Caustic Graphics hardware will be in the realworld, we just don't have the information we need yet.

Here's to hoping for the best.