Fermi: a raytracing BEAST!!! (and FYC: Fuck You Charlie :-)

Fermi launched yesterday and it redefined the meaning of realtime raytracing/pathtracing. Everyone knew it was going to excell at CUDA computing tasks such as raytracing, but this is really nuts: Anandtech benched Nvidia's latest Optix demo called Design Garage which features sports cars rendered with path tracing, and the benchmark results are totally off the charts: Anand measured an 870% improvement in pathtracing performance between the GTX480 and the GTX285. Damn...I bet it flies in voxel raycasting too.

This is excellent news for all the GPU based renderers.

"Design Garage" is a really cool app and remarkably complete for a tech demo. It's probably the coolest tech demo that I've seen since the ATI Ruby demo for the HD4800 series (only this time it's playable ;-). Congratz to Nvidia and the Optix team for innovating and pushing GPU technology to the limit (despite the problems)! And fuck you Charlie (ah it feels so good :-)! Now if someone could just make a simple low res interactively pathtraced game with Optix...