Imagination adds ray-tracing to PowerVR graphics

LONDON – Graphics core licensor Imagination Technologies Group plc has, as expected, produced a generalized software development kit for ray-tracing applications. It has done this by way of the launch of the PowerVR Brazil SDK v1.0 ray traced rendering toolkit.

The software development kit has been developed from the ground up to make use of the PowerVR OpenRL API. As such it enables graphics software developers to add ray-tracing functionality to their applications, the company said.

OpenRL (Open Ray Tracing Library) is designed to work on any graphics hardware, including Imagination’s Caustic Professional ray-tracing board-level solutions and silicon in development. Imagination claims that OpenRL is the world's first device-independent API for writing ray tracing applications across a wide range of graphics hardware devices from AMD, Intel, and NVidia.

These developments have come out of Imagination's 2010 acquisition of Caustic Graphics Inc.

"The PowerVR Brazil SDK v1.0 is a notable milestone in our plans for bringing high performance ray tracing capabilities to a broader range of markets from desktop to, ultimately, mobile and embedded," said Tony King-Smith, vice president of marketing at Imagination Technologies, in a statement. "Our new OpenRL-based PowerVR Brazil SDK v1.0 delivers a comprehensive set of tools and capabilities, incorporating significant functionality inherited from the highly respected Brazil final frame renderer originally developed by Splutterfish. Since Caustic and Splutterfish engineers are both now fully integrated into our PowerVR visual IP engineering teams, we're delighted to release this next product from our emerging ray tracing technology portfolio, which complements our existing PowerVR OpenRL API SDK."

The Brazil SDK v1.0 enables the addition of ray tracing functionality to applications accelerated by the growing range of OpenRL renderers being developed by Imagination, including both software – running on x86 and x86-64 CPUs – and future hardware accelerated platforms. The Brazil SDK v1.0 has been used to create plug-ins for visual effects and design packages.

The Brazil SDK 1.0 is available to "qualified developers," Imagination said.


Related links and articles:

www.caustic.com

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