It's not every day you get a start-up in the graphics business announcing a new product and although it seems like the team behind Caustic Graphics is more than able to bring something new to the table, one has to wonder if they'll be allowed to by certain more established names in the business.
The product is named the CausticOne and as you can see from the only picture of the card which you can find below, this isn't a graphics card.
What the CausticOne does, at least according to Caustic Graphics, is accelerate OpenGL Raytracing by up to 200x compared to current solutions (that would be with multiple multi core CPUs then). This is not a small number to throw around, as it would more or less make Raytracing real time. Although we've seen Intel's tech demos with some super high-end PCs doing it, Caustic Graphics claims that the way this is done makes it look ugly, as a lot of aspects of how Raytracing works are ignored.
The CausticOne doesn't just accelerate the primary rays as in Intel's demos, as it also accelerates all the secondary or scatter rays which allow for a much more realistically rendered scene. They also claim that the CausticOne "thrives in incoherent raytracing situations" which are the most difficult ones to render and takes up the most computing power.
The card doesn't work on its own, as it needs a special API which is a custom version of OpenGL which oddly enough is called CausticGL (is it just us, or is there a pattern in the names here? Ed.) and Caustic Graphics seems to refer to the two together as CausticRT (RT for Raytracing). Any OpenGL Raytracing application with support for the CausticGL API should benefit hugely from the CausticOne card and at the moment it seems like Caustic Graphics is pitching the solution towards animated films and video, computer games of course, but not for consumers as yet, but instead as a solution for improving the quality of CGI video and just about any other high-end Raytracing application users such as the automotive industry.
The CausticOne isn't going to replace your CPU or GPU though, as both are needed for the final computational tasks such as shading which should also be speed up significantly, as the heavy Raytracing workload has been offloaded onto the CausticOne card. The card itself looks rather unusual, as it appears to be a full length card with a PCI Express x4 connector. Each of the processors on the card also seems to have a dedicated SO-DIMM (it's not clear if this is DDR2 or DDR3 memory) and there also seems to be a PCI Express bridge chip of some kind on the card. Finally therer are a couple of connectors at the top of the card that might suggest that multiple cards could be connected together to further enhance the Raytracing performance.
For now we don't have a lot more details, but we'll be following Caustic Graphics and keep an eye at what they're working on, as this is an interesting development. We have a feeling that Intel, AMD and Nvidia aren't too happy about what Caustic Graphics is preparing to unleash on to the world, but we have a feeling that this will at least initially be a very expensive niche product.
You can find Caustic Graphics website here
