Caustic Graphics rallies developers to its 3-D graphics technology

caustic-1Caustic Graphics announced today that it’s signed up a number of software companies to adapt their software to its CausticRT development platform — a platform that will bring the highest quality graphics and animation to a community of artists and designers

Caustic’s specialty is ray tracing, a field of graphics that delivers extremely realistic animations. The company has designed a ray tracing graphics chip that will sit alongside traditional microprocessors and graphics chips in high-power personal computers. The San Francisco-based company will launch the chips in 2010. But to get people to use them, it needs the developers.

The software companies that Caustic announced support from today at the Siggraph graphics show in New Orleans today, are LightWork Design, Robert McNeel & Associates, Realtime Technology AG (RTT AG), Right Hemisphere and Splutterfish. Autodesk will demo software on Caustic’s platform in its booth as part of a jaw-dropping architectural design demo.

In addition, Caustic is proposing its ray tracing solution as an industry standard. It is hoping for support from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, but it may face a competing standard from graphics chip maker Nvidia.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.