NVIDIA offers free ray-tracing engine

[Wreckage]

http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/17889#jazz

Ever since Intel started talking about Larrabee, the concept of accelerating ray-tracing on graphics hardware has generated an increasing amount of buzz. Today, after six months of beta testing, Nvidia has introduced a free ray-tracing engine for workstation and servers with Quadro and Tesla GPUs.

 

[Denithor]

Uh, so why no support on consumer (gaming) cards?

 

[Modelworks]

And nobody in VFX or CG really cares. We have seen it before . It is nice for press releases but until it is integrated and working with things like renderman , vray or maxwell renderers it has zero impact. Larrabee is the same thing, no interest until it actually is working with the popular renderers.

 

[Kakkoii]

And nobody in VFX or CG really cares. We have seen it before . It is nice for press releases but until it is integrated and working with things like renderman , vray or maxwell renderers it has zero impact. Larrabee is the same thing, no interest until it actually is working with the popular renderers.

Good thing ChaosGroup is working on a GPU accelerated version of V-RAY

http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/news.html?i=126#newsid126

 

[BenSkywalker]

Uh, so why no support on consumer (gaming) cards?

More then likely because it would be too slow. Devs can understand why, consumers aren't so forgiving. I'm sure their hope is to get it to devs now and then Fermi will be able to take advantage of it at some point(not saying that will be the case, just I'm sure that is their hope).

Also, while today’s release requires NVIDIA’s professional solutions of Quadro FX and NVIDIA Tesla, the OptiX engine will soon expand its support to include NVIDIA GeForce GPUs with Fermi, as forthcoming performance will make ray tracing possible in consumer applications.

 

[Modelworks]

Good thing ChaosGroup is working on a GPU accelerated version of V-RAY

http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/news.html?i=126#newsid126

Yeah that version is coming along but still a long ways off from what is needed. They need to be able to do handle frames in the 3-4k resolutions without much tweaking before the studios will pay for the gpu to render out long segments. Right now render farms are cheaper and work 100% with whatever they send it.

The problem with all GPU solutions to date has been that most features are not supported or you have to re-work your scenes to match what the GPU wants, often having to compromise on quality.

Just noticed they still don't have the version of vray up that we used on 2012 . It was enhanced to allow for much larger scenes and some GPU support more than normal. I was told it would be out for everyone, but maybe they just wanted to keep it in house for some reason. I don't remember them saying it wouldn't be released to the public though.