Advanced Rendering Technology Ltd has a chip for doing photo realistic ray tracing 3D rendering in hardware, dramatically reducing the time it takes to render photo realistic images. The AR250 chip is the first of a new kind of graphics chip that does high end ray tracing in hardware rather than software, the company said. Using multiple AR250 chips in parallel, the company is developing the RenderDrive plug-in peripheral and will run 100 times faster than equivalent software, it said. The product should significantly improve the economics of producing 3D animation and dramatically cut the time it takes to render computer-animated films like Toy Story. Up until now ray tracing has been done in software and is prohibitively power hungry, but ART’s new approach will remove the need for multiple high performance workstations, it said. The Cambridge-based designer and developer of computer graphics technology got 1m British pounds last month to finance development of its new RenderDrive. Capital group 3i provided 350,000 pounds with founding investors Providence Investment Co, Phoenix VLSI and Cambridge Quantum Fund putting up the rest. The silicon is being manufactured now and will be available early next year. The RenderDrive will be ready in the middle of next year, said Daniel Hall, co-founder and commercial director at ART. We have had a lot of interest in the drive but we can’t say who from at this stage, explained Hall, although this has been reported to be from the likes of Disney and Spielberg. Ray tracing is a better quality of rendering than polygon rendering, said Hall. Ray tracing uses complex algorithms to model light transmission as reflected from objects in the same way humans see it reflected. It is distinct from polygon rendering which models objects by breaking them up into simple geometric shapes so that they can be described mathematically. At present, animations are limited to simple artificial scenes, which lack proper lighting or reflections. This is because, using current technology, high quality computer graphics are extremely demanding on computer power – a 30 second commercial can take 20 days to render on the fastest workstation, said Hall.
