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The Lay Scientist (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
A number of people have asked me about the little moon widget you can see at the foot of this blog, which shows the phases of the moon in real-time. In fact, the image is generated by the U.S. Navy's Time Service Department. These lunar phase images were created by R. Schmidt from ray-traced images of the Moon. A Clementine spacecraft mosaic of the lunar surface was mapped onto a sphere, and scenes...
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MAKE: Blog (Free subscription) | 11/25/2009
My first introduction to 3D modelling, way back in 1999, was ray-tracing with the classic freeware Persistence of Vision (POV-Ray) package . The whole point of POV-Ray was (and is) to program a virtual 3D scene that can be rendered into still images very slowly, but in amazing detail, using ray-tracing algorithms. It was never about producing models for 3D printing or other computer-assisted manufacture...
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AppShopper.com: Price Changes (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
Shutout 1.3 Category: Games Price: $0.99 -> Free ( iTunes ) Description: Free for 24 hrs. to celebrate our newest app: Arkel - It's Farkel. Please check it out. Shutout is an implementation of the game Canoga also known as Shut-the-box. It's a dice game, thought to have originated in England or perhaps Normandy. Similar wooden games have been played for many years in pubs around the world. Our...
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Engadget (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
Sure, you've been hearing NVIDIA toss around names like CUDA , Fermi and Tesla for what seems like ages now, but we're guessing this is the sort of thing that'll get most folks to really take notice: a promise to cut supercomputing costs by a factor of ten. That rather impressive feat comes courtesy of the company's new Tesla 20-series GPUs, which come in the form of both single GPU PCI-Express Gen-2...
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DV Hardware (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
NVIDIA introduced new Fermi based solutions for supercomputing at SC09 in Portland, Oregon. It's only an announcement though, the real hardware won't be available until Q2 2010. Additionally, the GPU maker also confirms that GeForce products based on Fermi will be available in Q1 2010. The new Tesla 20-series GPUs promise to reduce the cost of supercomputing by a factor of 10. They feature support...
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Click World News (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
robotsrule writes "As we discussed last month, RealityServer 3.0 is Nvidia's attempt to bring photo-realistic 3D images to any Internet-connected device, including the likes of Android and iPhone. RealityServer 3.0 pushes the CPU-killing 3D rendering process to a high-power, GPU based, back-end server farm based on Nvidia's Tesla or Quadro architectures. The resulting images are then streamed...
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EE Times (Free subscription) | 11/16/2009
Designers at TOPS Systems here have used the Mirabilis Design VisualSim tools to model, simulate and analyze the performance of a Real-Time Ray Tracing system with distributed software and a heterogeneous Multi-Core processor.
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Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
My first ever Common Lisp project was a raytracer. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't too great. Over time I started thinking about how I would make one that was more lispy, and during last couple of years I've been hacking on one every once and a while. It's called Raylisp , and while I'm not planning on ever properly releasing it -- this is purely a personal toy project -- I figured I might still make a...
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advanced nanotechnology (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Photorealistic images of carpet cloaks (9 page pdf) Using home-built dedicated ray-tracing software, we simulate photorealistic images of sceneries in three dimensions including dielectric carpet cloaks – i.e., continuously varying refractive-index distributions that allow for invisibility cloaking of a bump in a metallic carpet. Results for the ideal and for a simplified cloak are shown. The...
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Softpedia - Latest Mac software (Free subscription) | 11/13/2009
Free raytracing library created in C++
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TechConnect Magazine (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
As promised at Siggraph 2009, Nvidia has released OptiX, a ray tracing engine that's set to help developers speed up their ray tracing applications by utilizing a C-based API running on the CUDA architecture. According to its maker, the OptiX engine provides applications with features like parallelism (both within the GPU and across GPUs), state of the art acceleration structures (BVH and KD trees),...
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The Gamesblog (Free subscription) | 11/03/2009
Xbox 360/PS3; £44.99; cert 18; Gearbox/2K It's always risky merging two genres, especially two as well established as the FPS and the RPG, but Gearbox just about has the pedigree to try. Borderlands blurs boundaries at every step, with an almost ray-traced look that's a mix of cartoon, cyberpunk and wild west – think Mad Max and you're not far off the mark. You start the game by choosing...
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DV Hardware (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Chinese tech site PCZilla has published three shots that are reportedly rendered by NVIDIA's upcoming Fermi GPU. The first two pictures show very life-like faces, while the third screenshot shows an impressive ray-tracing scene of a room with multiple light sources. The image quality is very impressive, but it's unknown whether Fermi can achieve this kind of visual quality in real-time. NVIDIA Fermi...
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übergizmo (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
A Chinese website ( PCzilla ) has published images of what appears to be a ray-tracing demo for the upcoming graphics processor codenamed Fermi (a.k.a GeForce GT300). The image with the room (see extended post) is done with Mental Ray and is probably a CUDA demo. I'm not sure what the deal is with the two faces (including this one above). I suspect that they are also part of a general purpose computing...
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Electronista (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
A pair of leaks have revealed NVIDIA's Fermi hardware should both be a dramatic visual upgrade and have a quick release of mobile parts. A post today on a Chinese forum shows samples of the graphics chipset that include 3D rendered faces with both extremely high detail as well as particularly complex visual effects, such as natural-looking facial hair or skin glare. One also shows the level of detail...
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