NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) will be accelerating a wide range of ray tracing solutions being demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2010, which is being held at the Los Angeles Convention Center, July 27-29, 2010.
While ray tracing has been a well-established technique in computer graphics for generating images with tremendous accuracy and realism, it requires far more computation than alternative raster rendering approaches, and historically has been far slower as a result.

However, ray tracing solutions being shown at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference and expo illustrate that this limitation has been shattered. NVIDIA’s newest GPUs, based upon its Fermi architecture, are driving ray traced applications orders of magnitude faster than quad-core CPUs.

“What used to be an excuse for a coffee break is now a real-time experience when running on NVIDIA’s newest GPUs”, said Jeff Brown, general manager Professional Solutions Group, NVIDIA. “The speed up is truly transformative for our customers ‘ giving them interactive insight and dramatically enhancing their creative process in ways that have not been possible on individual workstations before.”

The massively parallel processing power of NVIDIA GPUs is a natural fit for the inherently parallel nature of ray tracing, with the NVIDIA CUDA architecture enabling software developers to develop high performance solutions in their choice of compute languages. NVIDIA also assists developers to quickly take advantage of the GPU by providing the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine for accelerating custom solutions, and iray from mental images for a complete, world-class renderer.

Companies demonstrating ray tracing solutions running on NVIDIA GPUs at SIGGRAPH include:

  • mental images, showing iray interactive rendering, using CUDA C, at the NVIDIA booth (#717)
  • NVIDIA, showing OptiX interactive examples, using CUDA C, at the NVIDIA booth
  • Bunkspeed, showing SHOT with interactive iray, at the NVIDIA booth
  • Lightworks, showing Artisan, using CUDA C and OptiX, at the Lightworks booth (#225)
  • Works Zebra, showing Zeany, using CUDA C and OptiX, at the NVIDIA booth
  • cebas Visual Technology Inc., showing Final Render, using CUDA C, at the cebas booth (#314)
  • Refractive Software, showing the Octane Renderer, using CUDA C, at the Cubix Corp. booth (#1126)
  • Chaos Software Ltd., showing V-Ray GPU, using OpenCL, at the Chaos booth (#313)

“Our photorealistic iray rendering solution demonstrates the massive speedup delivered by NVIDIA’s new Fermi GPU architecture,” said Rolf Herken, CEO & CTO of mental images. “iray delivers dramatically higher performance on a single Quadro GPU than on a quad-core CPU. In addition, iray can leverage multiple GPUs in a single workstation or across a cluster of machines for ultimate performance scalability.”

“Our V-Ray GPU solution is delivering revolutionary performance on the latest NVIDIA GPUs,” said Peter Mitev, General Manager of Chaos Group. “Our users have always appreciated V-Ray’s ease of use for generating incredible images, and this speed increase will take that to the next level as V-Ray GPU gives their creative choices unmatched interactivity, stability and power.”

“finalRender has always been quick to solve customer needs, and the performance we’re obtaining now with NVIDIA GPUs opens up a world of artistic possibilities for us,” said Edwin Braun, General Manager of cebas.”We’re seeing a single GPU equal many quad-core CPUS while delivering the exact same image, which will give our users considerable flexibility.”

“The performance we’re getting with NVIDIA GPUs will transform what our end users are able to do within our widely adopted ray trace rendering solutions,” said Steve Gardner, Business Development Director at Lightwork Design, Ltd. “Lightworks will be bringing solutions to market this year that will enable our worldwide OEM customers to quickly take advantage of this GPU revolution.”

At SIGGRAPH 2010, NVIDIA is presenting two technical papers, “OptiX: A General Purpose Ray Tracing Engine,” and, “PantaRay: Directional Occlusion for Fast Cinematic Lighting of Massive Scenes.” Additionally, NVIDIA is also sponsoring a developer session, “Rapid GPU Ray Tracing Development with NVIDIA OptiX.” Attendees are encouraged to attend any/all of these, where they can learn how to use GPU-based ray tracing.

For more information: www.nvidia.com