Real time ray tracing using Imagination Technology..

[arqrenderz]

beats the Nvidia 980ti all the way, interesting thing..

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/imagination-real-time-ray-tracing,30932.html

[pokoy]

Nice to see Brazil is still around. It may be a slightly different incarnation than people have thought but still, it's getting its share of fame which is good :D

The renderer, which is based on the Brazil renderer and was called Caustic Visualizer later (developed by 2 of the original Brazil devs) and a card (working prototypes were available to a few testers) have been available since around 5-6 years, internally probably a lot longer. It was never available commercially but there were efforts to ship it as a Max and Maya plugin. Both were going through an alpha stage but got discontinued.
It was (or still is) fast - faster than a lot of other renderers on the market - but was never completed. It was a path tracer, that's probably what they mean by comparing it with Cycles, with really nice visual output, I really liked it. The renderer ran on the CPU but the card brought another speed improvement (2 - 5 times faster depending on the scene), with only a small fan and very low energy consumption. They've probably improved the speed factor.

Here's an image I rendered with the Visualizer alpha back then:
http://pokoy.cgsociety.org/art/studio-3ds-lighting-max-chemistry-color-photoshop-colors-contrast-vivid-lab-caustic-3d-1111036

[Ludvik Koutny]

I am quite skeptical about a small 10Watt eating PCI-E card looking like cheapest sound card beating GTX980 in raytracing perfomance :|

[FrostKiwi]

I lose my shit with images like this.
Real or not, that is bullshit, implying an "Nvidia on the left" card can neither GI nor Glossy reflections.

[tomislavn]

I am quite skeptical about a small 10Watt eating PCI-E card looking like cheapest sound card beating GTX980 in raytracing perfomance :|

But did you make us some nice pancakes yet? :)

[maru]

I lose my shit with images like this.
Real or not, that is bullshit, implying an "Nvidia on the left" card can neither GI nor Glossy reflections.

My thoughts were similar.

[pokoy]

I lose my shit with images like this.
Real or not, that is bullshit, implying an "Nvidia on the left" card can neither GI nor Glossy reflections.

I am not sure if this is meant as a comparison between rasterizing on the left (DirectX/OpenGL rather than a raytracer of any kind) and their raytracer on the right. But that's what marketing is about in the end. Same goes for Nvidia (Marketing: "GPU rendering speed increase by a factor of 20", "Real-time feature film quality at your fingertips" etc..)

Anyways, after years of development, you'd think they would have visually nicer demos, in fact these demos were around years ago already. There were a few nice images in the alpha time and some could've easily become nice looking demo scenes. Another good example is Autodesk - there are tons of really high end images and animations made with it, still most marketing stuff they come up with is not the level you'd expect.

But the thing is they're not targeting desktops (anymore). Imagination's main target is the huge mobile market where low energy consumption is a must.

[Juraj]

Also, prop. what hey mean by "ray-tracing" is not full-scale offline rendering but simple addition to real-time graphics like nVidia kept trying 10 years ago. For example to add correct single-bounce speculars, but nothing else.
By adding their dedicated chip, the GPU would be free of such overhead, same philosophy as dedicated 'physics' card, again, idea that ended up as abandoware.

They're probably hoping they will be bought by another tech giant and incorporated, even if for patents alone.

[FrostKiwi]

still most marketing stuff they come up with is not the level you'd expect.

Instead of  showing data, a short demo or anything they point at the competition and trash it.
Demo quality doesn't matter, programmers are not artists, if a demo looks aweful it is forgiveable, as its supposed to demo the tech and nothing else, but this is foul play.
In my eyes they lose all their credibility.

How can I trust the data they release now, if the first thing they show is," look how everyone else is bad compared to us?"