NVIDIA buys ray tracing specialist

Posted at: 4:19am 23rd May 2008 by James Morris

Despite previously arguing that ray tracing is not the answer, NVIDIA is putting its money where its mouth isn’t and has just snapped up another company specialising in ray tracing. Just five months ago, NVIDIA acquired Mental Images, creator of the Mental Ray rendering engine used in a wide selection of professional 3D applications.

This time, NVIDIA has exerted its purchasing power on RayScale, which produces another professional ray tracing engine. RayScale’s LightNow plugs into Autodesk Maya to produce photorealistic 3D rendering and interactive ray-tracing. The latter sounds a lot like a real-time ray-tracing engine, as it provides a ‘fully responsive ray traced rendering window that updates to changes in the Maya model's geometry or materials,’ according to RayScale’s website.


Both these acquisitions have been focused on the professional market. The ray-tracing engines both companies produce are aimed at professional 3D content creation. However, one of NVIDIA’s aims with the acquisition of mental images was to move the Mental Ray renderer over to CUDA, its GPGPU interface for harnessing graphics power for tasks other than regular, rasterised 3D rendering.


NVIDIA has already ported PhysX over to CUDA, so its graphics cards will be able to calculate real-time physics on the GPU instead of the CPU or a dedicated card. The forthcoming GTX 260 and 280 will allegedly be the first consumer cards to run PhysX, although all NVIDIA GPUs since G80 have the requisite unified shader architecture to run it.


However, it could be a while before we see ray tracing on consumer desktops, as this will also require games developer support. That is likely to be some years away, especially with so much expertise invested in traditional 3D rendering technology. What is clear, though, is that NVIDIA sees the future threat from Intel’s burgeoning multi-core processors and Larrabee multi-core graphics looming ahead, and is strengthening its position.

To underline the power of its GPUs for tasks other than 3D, according to PC Perspective, NVIDIA has announced a client for Folding@Home. ATI’s GPU client is already very effective at Folding, and NVIDIA’s will be ‘incredibly fast’ on its GTX 260 and 280, although no figures have been quoted.