Thursday, October 4th 2012
Siliconarts Announces 'RayCore' Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU
Siliconarts Inc., a Korean tech startup, developed RayCore, the real-time ray tracing graphics processor (GPU) for the first time in graphics hardware history. RayCore is the next-generation GPU that is used in rendering high-quality 3D graphics whose graphics performance surpasses that of rasterization GPU approach.
Mostly utilized in Hollywood studios in creating huge contents such as "Toy Story" and "Avatar," realistic effects are the key to differentiating the features of ray tracing technology compared to a rasterization approach. However, ray tracing was only implemented using software due to the limitations to process exponential calculations, to equip with highly expensive series of rendering gears and to process and the wait for significantly longer rendering times. In addition, it was not even implemented on a real-time basis.
RayCore, developed by Siliconarts, is a hardware that has overcome the limitations of the existing ray tracing approach, applying all of the benefits of ray tracing to its product that can render cinema-quality 3D graphics effects on real-time basis.
Particularly, RayCore is designed to consume the industry's lowest power level in order to implement both User Interface and User Experience on mobile platforms such as smartphones; it is expected that a significant impact is inevitable to the mobile game space. In other words, UI/UX as well as mobile games created based on these high-quality 3D effects will be made possible. A senior official of Siliconarts mentioned that ray tracing technology-enabled smartphones will be introduced soon, as the company already completed its license agreement with Company A to supply RayCore GPU IP.
"The key feature of this product is that ray tracing, which was considered impossible to implement using hardware, is now available not only on PCs and servers, but also in diverse devices such as smartphones and smart TVs. None of the global GPU companies have successfully implemented ray tracing on a real-time basis and their technology level is still trivial. It is almost impossible to implement," said Hyung Min Yoon, the CEO of Siliconarts.
You can witness the powerful implementation of exquisite 3D graphics using RayCore as the company will be demonstrating its products at i-SEDEX2012 from October 9 - October 11 at #2570, Hall 2, KINTEX, Goyang-si, Gyunggi-do, Korea.
Mostly utilized in Hollywood studios in creating huge contents such as "Toy Story" and "Avatar," realistic effects are the key to differentiating the features of ray tracing technology compared to a rasterization approach. However, ray tracing was only implemented using software due to the limitations to process exponential calculations, to equip with highly expensive series of rendering gears and to process and the wait for significantly longer rendering times. In addition, it was not even implemented on a real-time basis.
Particularly, RayCore is designed to consume the industry's lowest power level in order to implement both User Interface and User Experience on mobile platforms such as smartphones; it is expected that a significant impact is inevitable to the mobile game space. In other words, UI/UX as well as mobile games created based on these high-quality 3D effects will be made possible. A senior official of Siliconarts mentioned that ray tracing technology-enabled smartphones will be introduced soon, as the company already completed its license agreement with Company A to supply RayCore GPU IP.
"The key feature of this product is that ray tracing, which was considered impossible to implement using hardware, is now available not only on PCs and servers, but also in diverse devices such as smartphones and smart TVs. None of the global GPU companies have successfully implemented ray tracing on a real-time basis and their technology level is still trivial. It is almost impossible to implement," said Hyung Min Yoon, the CEO of Siliconarts.
You can witness the powerful implementation of exquisite 3D graphics using RayCore as the company will be demonstrating its products at i-SEDEX2012 from October 9 - October 11 at #2570, Hall 2, KINTEX, Goyang-si, Gyunggi-do, Korea.
24 Comments on Siliconarts Announces 'RayCore' Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU
Also I'm not sure I want my games back to hard shadows again (looking at the pictures). Ray-tracing without area lights pretty much sucks in this day and age.
sites.google.com/a/siliconarts.co.kr/siliconarts-inc/newsroomHere's the catch and not very impressive apparently.
From graphics.stanford.edu/papers/i3dkdtree/gpu-kd-i3d.pdf:And here bouliiii.blogspot.com.es/2008/08/real-time-ray-tracing-with-cuda-100.html2.4 Opteron - 8.7 million rays/s
X1900 XTX - 15.2 million rays/s
Cell - 57.2 million rays/s
8800 GT - 12-40 million rays/s
GTX 280 - 100 million rays/s
Current gen GPU?? - 2-4x GTX280? More? GTX 480 was 8x faster than GTX285 in Design Garage demo. So what 200-800 million rays/s for a current GPU??
RayCore - 14-24 million ray/s per core.
(Yeah, I might be comparing apples to oranges, but I think that it gives a general idea and it's not like the examples given by Siliconarts look much more advanced than previous realtime ray-tracers)
If 1 RayCore is aimed at mobile chips (that's what I understand), how many cores would fit in a die size equal to a high-end GPU? 10 (240 million rays/s)? 20 (480 million rays/s)?
After investigating a lot I only have more questions lol. But I do believe a little more on the posibility of real-time ray-tracing being absolutely posible right now and definitely by 2013-2014. As to being faster than rasterization tho, NO WAY.
On the other hand I don't think that more funding is going to help them much, looking at the link of the website I posted it seems that they got some nice funding from Korean government. More investment would definitely be needed for a grand scale manufacturing plan, but I don't think it's going to help R&D all that much.
So summarizing, I don't consider them behind (nethier ahead as PR says), but I don't think funding would improve their tech much (talking abut generational jumps) either.
It woud be nice to have them as competitors to AMD and Nvidia on the GPU side, but they don't offer equivalent tech so I doubt game developers will be interested unless AMD/Nvidia offer the same tech and most probably an API standard would need to be created before they move a finger in that direction.
For professional market this is good, no doubt and here they can certainly compete, since being a platform on their own is not a problem, tho I hear that Nvidia's Optix has already a substantial market and there's free GPU renderers such as Cycles, Luxrender which are very popular too. Competition is good any day of the week tho.
ps.: fixed the link for ya
I investigated and the claims don't seem to match what the reality is atm.
Like I said I know it's kind of apples to oranges, but there's absolutely no way to tell if RayCore offers anything over existing GPU ray-tracers or if it's actually the other way around (i.e rayCore using "optimizations", compromises). Pictures provided by Siliconarts definitely DON'T show anything new or outstanding, so why should we assume there tracer is more advanced?
PS: Thanks for the link. I fixed it. For some reason a colon "magically appeared" at the end for no reason. :p
Btw - as I already said it above - I agree about the picture, it makes the whole PR attempt to look like a really bad joke, and it would be better to leave it out:)
But back to the discussion, I'm not completely sure that advantage (which is probably just temporal should ray-tracing become an standard) is even enough now, considering that GPU makers are probably way ahead on manufacturing and probably on raw performance. I've not seen comparable numbers for current cards. Nebulous in my memory I think I remember reading that Design Garage shoots over 1 billion rays/s, but that's at 3 fps on a Fermi, so certainly not real-time and not comparable and to make matters worse it was at a higher 1080p resolution. Hard to make comparisons. Only that on that particular ray-tracing demo GTX480 was 8x faster than GTX 285, but that's probably in large part, Nvidia optimizing for Fermi (not that Fermi >>>> Tesla for those kind of tasks).
So all in all, I agree, it's too early to draw conclusions. I'm just trying to cover all angles and understand all things implicated, for which discussing it is really advantageous. Nothing like seing others' pov to cover all angles.
i dont see this as even slightly evolutionary either ,imagination technologies bought caustic tec a few years ago and have been threatening to release an arm Soc with powerVr/caustic tech capable of raytraced gfx's, is it possible this is linked to that(ala patent troll tech) , regardless they are far from the first with this but hey ho.
who is this Company A and what phones are going to have them , what Oem's are going to be shipping them, premature pr Bs Imho, and anyway crysis isnt going to run on it so it must be crap:p
Btw I didn't see it supports 960x640, so with 4 of them 1920x1280 would be posible. No need for 6 (was thinkikng max res was 960x480)
www.xbitlabs.com/news/graphics/display/20120124200826_Imagination_Technologies_May_Introduce_Standalone_Ray_Tracing_Accelerator.html