Remember PowerVR GPUs which last saw light when GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500 were around? The company behind it, Imagination Technologies, is working on a discrete PCI-Express GPGPU card for workstations targeting the media industry, which provides real-time ray-tracing acceleration. After its exile from PC graphics, Imagination Technologies worked on and achieved prevalence in embedded GPUs, GPUs embedded into ARM System-on-chips (SoCs), found in smartphones and tablets. This kept its GPU IP and R&D more than afloat.

In 2011, the company acquired Caustic Graphics, a smaller and much newer startup, which was working on dedicated ray-tracing accelerators, and had come up with a working FCPGA chip. Together the company is in the final stages of preparing a product that will bring Imagination Technologies back to the PC, only this time as a GPGPU (such as NVIDIA Tesla and AMD FireStream), and not a display-GPU. The product will be backed by OpenRL Brazil 3.0 SDK. This product will launch some time in 2012.

Caustic Graphics, a new 3D computer graphics company, launches today with a fundamental breakthrough in raytracing acceleration that is set to define a new era in professional 3D production and interactive consumer graphics. Raytracing, the gold-standard for creating 3D imagery, duplicates the natural physics of light, creating stunning images by meticulously tracing the path of light to and throughout any given scene.
Caustic's first-generation technology will deliver an average 20X increase in the speed used to create stunning, realistic 3D imagery for film and video, game development, as well as automotive and consumer product design. The second generation of Caustic's technology, due early next year, is expected to gain an additional order of magnitude in performance, offering 200X speed over today's state-of-the-art graphics products. This massive speed jump is due to Caustic's patent-pending raytracing algorithms implemented in a semiconductor design.