Nvidia To Acquire Ray Tracing Company

PC Perspective is reporting Nvidia will be acquiring RayScale, a ray tracing software company. An official announcement is expected in the next few days if not sooner.

According the RayScale’s website the company “provides ray tracing photo-realistic solutions,” and makes products for Autodesk Maya that utilizes a hybrid rendering technique. No other details were revealed about the acquisition or how Nvidia will be utilizing RayScale’s expertise.

If true, this would be an interesting acquisition for Nvidia. In March, Nvidia’s chief scientist, Dr. David Krik, shared his doubts about ray tracing with future games. Dr. Krik went as far as pointing out weaknesses in ray tracing versus current rasterization techniques, pointing out antialiasing as a specific example. However, Dr. Krik, points out the possibility of future hybrid rending techniques, combing both rasterization and ray tracing.

Earlier this year, Intel fired off statements at the Intel Developer Forum that pushed Nvidia to “open a can of whoop-ass.” Pat Gelsinger, Intel senior vice president, essentially proclaimed Nvidia’s curret GPU as dead. “Graphics that we have all come to know and love today, I have news for you. It’s coming to an end. Our multi-decade old 3D graphics rendering architecture that’s based on a rasterization approach is no longer scalable and suitable for the demands of the future,” said Gelsinger.

Gelsinger’s statements were the opening lines to Intel’s unveiling of the upcoming Larrabee graphics architecture. Larrabee is Intel’s first attempt at a discrete graphics solution that borrows from the x86 architecture and has been reported to feature multiple cores. Intel has also announced the new chip will support OpenGL and DirectX, along with new SSE-like extensions known as Advanced Vector Extensions. However, most importantly Intel has been pushing the chip as a ray tracing monster.