Yesterday, I stumbled over NVidia OpitX
NVidia publishes this raytracing engine for free now.
The engine uses nvidia graphic cards for massive parallelized calculations.
The description of OptiX reads like it is customizable in a wide range, but I don't know what this thing really can do. The used technique promises super fast rendering.
Now the idea sneaked in my head to use this as an alternative rendering engine in A:M
Unfortunately I don't know anything about writing plugins or whatever is needed to use this engine in A:M. (I earn my money with programming, but this is something completely different)
What do you think about it?
Full Version: NVidia OptiX - as optional raytracing engine ?
If anyone could do it I'm sure Steffen could. I'm sure he's aware of hardware developments like this and others.
However, the factors against it happening soon are:
-no mac version available. Mac users out of luck.
-requires users to have specific NVidia cards. ATI users out of luck.
-a rendering pipeline that works both with GPU assist and without it will be doubly time-consuming to maintain and debug.
I dimly recall that there is an "Open" GPU scheme floating around that may be a better goal for development. But I'm sure any of them would be huge undertakings for the programmer.
I bet there are book on the subject.
However, the factors against it happening soon are:
-no mac version available. Mac users out of luck.
-requires users to have specific NVidia cards. ATI users out of luck.
-a rendering pipeline that works both with GPU assist and without it will be doubly time-consuming to maintain and debug.
I dimly recall that there is an "Open" GPU scheme floating around that may be a better goal for development. But I'm sure any of them would be huge undertakings for the programmer.
QUOTE
Unfortunately I don't know anything about writing plugins or whatever is needed to use this engine in A:M. (I earn my money with programming, but this is something completely different)
I bet there are book on the subject.
What isn't so great about pure raytracing is scene setups are tedius, lighting can be sometimes impossible to get a good look and rendering is slow.
What is so nice about AM is it is a hybrid renderer. You can fake a reflection on a single object in a scene using a localized environment map or if you want you can go as far as invoking the caustics and renderosity.
There aren't many programs out there that are good hybrids, I would hate to have to raytrace everything I do.
What is so nice about AM is it is a hybrid renderer. You can fake a reflection on a single object in a scene using a localized environment map or if you want you can go as far as invoking the caustics and renderosity.
There aren't many programs out there that are good hybrids, I would hate to have to raytrace everything I do.
QUOTE(pixelplucker @ Nov 10 2009, 09:22 AM) 
What isn't so great about pure raytracing is scene setups are tedius, lighting can be sometimes impossible to get a good look and rendering is slow.
What is so nice about AM is it is a hybrid renderer. You can fake a reflection on a single object in a scene using a localized environment map or if you want you can go as far as invoking the caustics and renderosity.
There aren't many programs out there that are good hybrids, I would hate to have to raytrace everything I do.
What is so nice about AM is it is a hybrid renderer. You can fake a reflection on a single object in a scene using a localized environment map or if you want you can go as far as invoking the caustics and renderosity.
There aren't many programs out there that are good hybrids, I would hate to have to raytrace everything I do.
Hash tried Gelato out and it was nothing but a big mistake... it was much slower than the real renderer of A:M so they dropped it.
I dont know what this new thing is, but if it is anything like that it doesnt help much, especially for animated renderings... for static once it was doing great, but anything else was a pain in the ass...
Martin has stated about that somewhere... you could search for his opinion on that.
*Fuchur*
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