Support for real-time raytrace card?

[Glob Studios]

Imagination Technologies has come out with a couple of real-time raytrace graphics cards including the Caustic R2500. They are a bit expensive at the moment, but I expect they will come down over time. Is there any interest at Hash in adding support for these in the future? It would provide a great capability for previewing animations. You can read about them here:

 

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/she...y-tracing-card/

 

-Vance

[robcat2075]

I don't speak for Hash but I'd expect supporting it very soon is unlikely because...

 

-it's much more expensive than A:M, probably even more expensive than most of the computers that A:M users own

-which means very few A:M users would be likely to purchase such a card

-which means the development time spent on supporting it would drive very few sales.

 

And it's not OpenGL so it would require a new pipeline to be supported between A:M and the display card in addition to what is already supported.

 

If they could make that work as a graphics card that is transparently run by OpenGL they would have something. And make it cheaper.

 

Also as I watch the demo video, it's obviously faster than CPU ray tracing but it's still only updating a few frames per second. You'd have to turn it off to work on real character animation. You don't really need to see refraction or reflection to judge animation but you do need to see all the frames.

 

None-the-less, A:M has an SDK available. Encourage them to create a plugin for A:M that would use the card, then we'd just have to get someone to buy the card to try it.