Animation rendering software company Otoy has teamed up with graphics chip designer Imagination Technologies to enable cinematic VR to run on very low-power devices.
Otoy’s ray-tracing software, OctaneRender 4, can produce some amazing images (with 100 million rays per second) on a graphics processing unit (GPU) from Imagination’s PowerVR division, using only two watts of power. The ray-tracing performance per watt is about 10 times the level in the previous Otoy Octane Render 3 software.
This means that you’ll be able to see cool games and virtual reality imagery on low-power devices such as car dashboards, smartphones, VR headsets, augmented reality glasses, tablets, and TVs. The companies showed off the technology ahead of the Siggraph graphics conference in Anaheim, Calif., next week. Otoy wants content creators to be able to create beautiful animations and effects without compromising interactivity or realism, on any device.
OctaneRender 4, running on the current PowerVR Wizard GR6500 Ray Tracing hardware, is able to trace over 100 million rays per second in fully dynamic scenes, within a power envelope suitable for lightweight mobile, VR and AR glasses. According to Imagination, these results are just the tip of the iceberg. The company expects performance to significantly increase based on improvements already in the pipeline.
“Accelerated ray tracing is a game changer that will massively disrupt GPU rendering,” said Otoy CEO Jules Urbach (who is speaking at GamesBeat 2016 on Aug. 1). “It is a major reason why Otoy is merging Brigade and OctaneRender 4 next year, which will bring real time cinematic path tracing to both Unity and Unreal Engine. We feel this is a huge milestone in helping the games industry move beyond legacy rasterization frameworks built on OpenGL, Vulkan or DirectX. We’re excited about the possibilities this will open up for true physically correct rendering in gaming, VR and mixed/augmented reality. As PowerVR Ray Tracing gets deployed from consumer devices to the cloud, it will allow us to realize new and amazing experiences a decade ahead of schedule.”