Imagination Demos Realtime Ray Tracing

[Guest]

Imagination Technology demoed a new PowerVR GPU at CES2016. Called the PowerVR Wizard, It's not a mobile chip, but a desktop PCI card. With passive cooling and only 10 watts, it can ray-trace rings around an Nvidia GTX 980 Ti.

Imagination Demos Realtime Ray Tracing : Read more

 

[kenjitamura]

This sounds really awesome. I wonder if video game/graphics engine developers can disable ray tracing on the GPU at driver level and leave it all up to this slim add-on card. It'd free up GPU power for everything but ray-tracing and come out with a significantly better picture.

If that can happen and they keep the cost of the card low enough then this will become a ubiquitous desktop component until the GPU developers decide to include their own dedicated ray-tracing processor on the graphics card. But if it has a high price then I think this will become a niche item for 3D artists which would still be a pretty big market.

 

[Shankovich]

Very nice, reminds me of the PhysX cards long ago 😉. It is my hope that at some point this becomes something licenced that AMD and nVidia can add to their cards/ architectures in the future.

 

[palladin9479]

This as an add-int card isn't such a good idea, I think they are using it to demonstrate their technology IP and attract licensing from the big manufacturers. Intel, nVidia and AMD will all end up licensing this technology and integrating it into their existing products.

 

[cschodt]

I think that was the idea.

This card isn't really the final product, it's a testbed and showcase for the technology.

Imagination either wants to get the contract to build the gpu for a console, or get this chip shrunk to mobile scale and have it added to an SOC.

 

[alextheblue]

If it was cheap enough I wouldn't mind it as an add-on board at least initially. As long as it gets licensed and not snapped up ala PhysX, so it could end up implemented in solutions from multiple vendors.

 

[Mousemonkey]

So how much are Nvidia going to shell out for this one? Anyone care to wager? :lol:

 

[f-14]

what were the system specs of the two machines? was it a 980ti paired with ddr3 1066 and a pentium vs the VR card paired ddr4 3200 with an i7-8350 or i7-6700?
lots of ways to rig that.

 

[bloodroses75]

what were the system specs of the two machines? was it a 980ti paired with ddr3 1066 and a pentium vs the VR card paired ddr4 3200 with an i7-8350 or i7-6700?
lots of ways to rig that.

My guess is that the machines are the same. Nvidia and AMD cards atm aren't really designed for ray tracing; just brute force rasterisation and shading.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of the Nvidia card using rasterisation vs the PowerVR using ray tracing to see if the performance/image comparison is closer.

 

[c0rr0sive]

Anyone remember PhysX cards? Same thing will happen once this company gets a usable product out. Nvidia will surely buy them up before AMD or Intel can ever attempt to buy them, and it will become an nvidia exclusive technology.

 

[ratzes]

The fact that the image done by the gpu loaded in chunks before a long pause makes me think that the pause before was a driver initialization phase or cutting the scene in such a way to be processed. The chunks loaded much faster after the first chunk loaded (albeit much slower than the ray tracer card). Thought it would be worth being skeptical that the whole pause was just the nvidia card crunching.

 

[alextheblue]

Anyone remember PhysX cards? Same thing will happen once this company gets a usable product out. Nvidia will surely buy them up before AMD or Intel can ever attempt to buy them, and it will become an nvidia exclusive technology.

So how much are Nvidia going to shell out for this one? Anyone care to wager? :lol:

LOL that was my first thought, except that this isn't just some one-off product by a new hotshot quickbuck firm. Imagination Technology owns MIPS and they have products in a TON of devices whether their own chips or via technology licenses. The most well-known instance? Their graphics technology (PowerVR) is in every single iPhone ever, since the very beginning with their MBX IP. PowerVR designs are found in other smartphones/mobile devices too, and back in the day they were in PCs competing with ATI and Nvidia too, and in the Dreamcast (one of my favorite consoles). But "every iPhone ever period" is the biggest example.

So I don't think it's super likely that they're going to get snatched up, but if ANYONE was going to buy them the most likely candidate would be Apple. They would be hard-pressed to let someone else potentially wreck their upcoming SoCs by buying Imagtech and refusing to license next-gen designs.

Oh and although I don't care for Apple (nor their software as a rule), I am often impressed by the performance and power envelope of their SoCs, and that is in no small part due to PowerVR's designs. At this point it would be hard for them to take on Nvidia and AMD directly in rasterization. But raycasting? I would be all over an add-on card if price and power were on target and the big engines got support for hybrid raycastingt/rasterization rendering or something along those lines. Then they could license the tech out later to anyone that wants it and ponies up.

 

[alidan]

Very nice, reminds me of the PhysX cards long ago 😉. It is my hope that at some point this becomes something licenced that AMD and nVidia can add to their cards/ architectures in the future.

oh god i never want this licensed, otherwise nvidia will get it, cripple its implementation so only nvidia knows how to make the work arounds, and when amd figures them out, they cripple it in a new way.

id rather see the tech burned and dead than licensed out in any way.

ad in cards forever, if that were the case we would all likely own a physx card by now,