The Avalon Project Realtime Raytracing

[rwolf]

Has anyone heard of this before?

http://www.schwarzers.de/project_features.php.htm

Raytracing on a chip
Very high quality through real rendering
Realtime raytracing up to resolutions of 1600 x 1200 (with one chip)
Nearly any resolution in realtime by using more than one chip
Fully cascadable, features automated load balancing
AGP 4x/Pro or PCI-33/64 interface
Drivers for common operating systems
Very simple application programming interface (API)
Coexist with common hardware and drivers
Easily integrates in common professional software and game engines
Consumes only about 30W and delivers about ~ 500GFlops

Available Graphics Features:

Raytracing core
Per ray(subpixel) Phong, Blinn, Metal, Anisotropic, Oren-Nayar-Blinn shading, configurable / programmable
Reflexion, Refraction, Raytraced- & Soft-Shadows
Caustics, Global illumination
Volumetric/Area-lights, RealLight simulation
Texture [2D-Bitmaps]:
Diffuse, Alpha maps
Reflexion/Refraction maps
Bump map
Shadow map
Procedual Textures: 2D/3D with Noise, Turbulence
Antialiasing
DisplayDirect technology to display movies or TV in 3D-space

Software Support:

Own Graphics Extension Driver
DirectX 9.0 (on Microsoft WindowsTM based systems)
X-Windows (on Unix machines)
OpenGL 1.3 / 2.0
Operates in parallel with other graphical systems
Supported operating systems
WindowsTM 9x/NT/2000/XP/Me
Linux
BeOS
AmigaOS
MacOS
Solaris
Other as soon as possible
May use all display modes the operating system can offer


Graphics Performance Hardware Features


Complex scene handling on chip
Up to 64M triangles of any size but unmovable (dep. on Host-Memory)
Up to 40K-80K triangles of any size for movable objects
Render rate: 50M Pixels/s (1600 x 1200 Pixels, 25 times a second) with all triangles fully featured
Single pass rendering


Uses AVALON Very Fast Triangle Search (VFTS)
AGP 4x/Pro or PCI interface
On board texture and 3D-Memory expandable up to 4GB
Fully scalable (more than one chip/graphics card can work together)
Automated load balancing

 

[rwolf]

Here is some more information....

http://www.schwarzers.de/investors.php.htm

AVALON is a product which enables the representation of 3D-Graphics in realtime on a next generation mass market console, arcade system or also home PC. It is capable of calculating and delivering up to 25 images per second on low-performant PC hardware using the so called raytracing process.
AVALON consists of a combination of hard and software - in effect a Microchip and a software component (device driver) which pipes data to the chip.

AVALON may be regarded as an enhancement/extension to the graphics card. The driver in conjunction with the chip expands the funcionality of the graphics system to include a photorealistic graphics capability.

In this regard the product is entirely without comparison. Generally, the raytracing method is not suitable to render pictures at such a speed. In effect, the technologies available on the market currently could at best hope to achieve the performance level of AVALON in ten years time. This is primarily due to the intensive development effort personally invested in the creation of the algorithms over a number of years. By using the Raytracing-Method, AVALON surpasses the quality and accuracy of all currently available graphics interfaces on the market, i.e. OpenGL or Direct3D.

In order to produce and market AVALON, it is now necessary to identify partners with access to sufficient resources. Essentially, resources will be required to develop the chip (design prototype) and initiate the subsequent production process. Additionally, a partner will be required for the production and distribution of the graphics cards.

From the start, AVALON will offer world market appeal through its cutting edge technology and innovation lead. I am hoping for active support from established graphics hardware manufacturers and/or venture capital organisations in the future sale and marketing of AVALON.

 

[RussSchultz]

Sounds like Talon.

 

[MfA]

Doesnt seem a very active project.

You can reach the page by www.realtime-raytracing.com too BTW.

 

[arjan de lumens]

The pictured card looks like an Ethernet card, with the Ethernet-like connector, the QFP chip package, and the lack of the kind of memory chips that modern graphics cards are so full of.

They do not seem to have have an office address and the domain name is the last name of that of its owner, leading me to believe that this is basically just one guy and his bright ideas. Just how bright is hard to assess without working for him or sifting through his patents (assuming there are any) - he seems to have more experience doing software than hardware, so it's not really clear how well his ideas translate to hardware (possibly well, probably badly) and how fast/big the resulting chip would be - if the project ever gets off the ground. Unless he can assemble a team around his project and show something (like at least an FPGA prototype) he won't get anywhere anytime soon.

50 MPix/s fillrate with supposedly good overdraw elimination would place the performance somewhere in the Voodoo2 to RivaTNT range - hardly "more than 5 years ahead". And if he doesn't have a chip in hand, how does he even arrive at such an estimate?

And his design doesn't seem to support non-polygonal primitives, which is weird given that such primitives are relatively much easier to support in a raytracer than in an SGI-type pipeline.

And support for OpenGL and Direct3d when neither API supports the concept of a scene graph (which is AFAICS necessary for ray-tracing) sounds a bit far-fetched to me.

Hmmph. As much as I'd like to see a real hardware raytracer, I don't think this one will make it.

 

[Dave Baumann]

Look for Art VPS. They are active...

 

[sonix666]

Oh, so this is the card powering the Phantom console?

 

[retsam]

ummm thats not pci is it?? i think its eisa ... and i thinks it's an intel isa ethernet adapter if im correct ...


rets

 

[NeARAZ]

Raytracing core
...
Caustics, Global illumination
Volumetric/Area-lights, RealLight simulation

Now, what raytracing has to do with any kind of global illumination? Or are they supposed to be doing full Monte Carlo raytracing???

 

[arjan de lumens]

ummm thats not pci is it?? i think its eisa ... and i thinks it's an intel isa ethernet adapter if im correct ...

Nope. ISA/EISA cards have the end bracket at the other end of the card.