The Software (Developer Side)
With their solution, you can run both OpenGL and ray-tracing visuals meaning you aren’t sacrificing anything in your existing systems. Caustic has developed a set of API’s they call “CausticGL” and “CausticRT” for writing code to the new processor. They’ve all based on OpenGL and GLSL, so anyone with experience writing code for OpenGL and various shader languages will feel right-at-home. . In fact, the Caustic API’s may be good for anyone to brush up on, as they are attempting to get the API’s approved by Khronos as an open-spec for real-time raytracing systems.
Also, they’ve done their best to make everything customizable. For example, I noticed during one of the demos that the edges were a big ragged, and he said that AntiAliasing was disabled. He clicked a few buttons and turned it on, and showed me how you could have 2, 4, 8, or 16 rays per pixel for the antialiasing effect. But that’s not all, you also had the option of “full-screen antialiasing” (FSAA) or “edge-detecting anti-aliasing”. FSAA is well-known in the gaming and rasterization communities as that’s how anti-aliasing is typically performed. However, on the CausticOne you have a new option that renders the image, performs a quick edge-detection on the resulting image, and then casts more rays into the scene on the edges to clean up the display. The result is that the extra rays (and computational time) is only spent where it would be visible, maximizing the performance. But some vendors prefer, or requires, FSAA so it remains an options. Several things like this exist within the card.
