Implementations
Various implementations of ray tracing hardware have been created, both experimental and commercial:
- (2002–2009) ART VPS company (founded 2002), situated in the UK, sold ray tracing hardware for off-line rendering. The hardware used multiple specialized processors that accelerated ray-triangle intersection tests. Software provided integration with Maya (see Autodesk Maya) and Max (see Autodesk 3ds Max) data formats, and utilized the Renderman scene description language for sending data to the processors (the .RIB or Renderman Interface Bytestream file format). As of 2010, ARTVPS no longer produces ray tracing hardware but continues to produce rendering software.
- (2002) The computer graphics laboratory at Saarland University headed by Dr. -Ing Slusallek has produced prototype ray tracing hardware including the FPGA based fixed function data driven SaarCOR (Saarbrücken’s Coherence Optimized Ray Tracer) chip and a more advanced programmable (2005) processor, the Ray Processing Unit (RPU)
- (1996) Researchers at Princeton university proposed using DSPs to build a hardware unit for ray tracing acceleration, named "TigerSHARK"
- Implementations of volume rendering using ray tracing algorithms on custom hardware have also been proposed : (2002) VIZARD II or built (1999) : vg500 / VolumePro ASIC based system
- Caustic Graphics have produced a plug in card, the "CausticOne" (2010), that accelerates global illumination and other ray based rendering processes when coupled to a PC CPU and GPU. The hardware is designed to organize scattered rays (typically produced by global illumination problems) into more coherent sets (lower spatial or angular spread) for further processing by an external processor.
- Siliconarts developed a dedicated real-time ray tracing hardware (2010). RayCore (2011), which is the world's first real-time ray tracing semiconductor IP, was announced.
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