The company that provides graphics chips for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch has just bought another company that is known for its photo-realistic 3D graphics technology. Imagination Technologies says that it is definitely going to bring the cutting-edge ray tracing technologies it’s getting from Caustic Graphics into its mobile products, which means that iDevices are going to see a significant improvement in their graphics capability.
Hossein Yassaie, chief executive of the UK-based Imagination Technologies, said his company’s £17 million ($27 million US) acquisition of San Francisco’s Caustic Graphics would bring “Avatar-style graphics” to smartphones, game consoles and TVs within a few years. “Today, 3D graphics don’t look like the real thing,” he said. “But Caustic’s technology is different… these are photo-realistic images.” It’s Caustic’s ability to do high-end ray tracing – more sophisticated lighting effects with reflection, refraction, and scattering that usually require a dedicated non-real-time processor – in a way that can be implemented on a lower-power mobile chip that drew Imagination’s attention. Imagination Technologies PR Director David Harold said in an interview with TechRadar that “ray tracing is a key additional technology that traditionally has been regarded as the exclusive domain of specialised markets and non real-time applications. We will change that.” Caustic Graphics developed the OpenRL SDK, a cross-platform, industry-standard programming API that layers ray tracing extensions on top of the OpenGL and OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) APIs.
Source: AppleInsider
