Investing in the future
UK company Imagination Technologies, which specialises in designing low-power graphics cores, has announced the acquisition of Caustic Graphics for $27 million.
Caustic specialises in ‘real-time ray-tracing graphics'. This is a technology that increases the levels of photo-realism in rendered graphics, but which requires a lot of processing power to do so. It's considered the future of computer graphics, but is currently limited to things like CGI and industrial design.
The appeal of Caustic to Imagination is the technology developed by the company that makes ray-tracing a lot more efficient. This will apparently make ray-tracing available in circumstances previously denied it. Additionally, some Caustic technology allows traditionally-rendered graphics and ray-traced elements to coexist.
"The most exciting consumer technologies have always started in the professional industry until someone finds the right way to cost engineer and optimise power consumption of those technologies," said Imagination CEO Hossein Yassaie. "Ray-tracing is a key additional technology that traditionally has been regarded as the exclusive domain of specialised markets and non real-time applications. We intend to change that."
"We are therefore delighted to have reached agreement to acquire Caustic with its outstanding engineering team. The acquisition will enable us to accelerate our plans to be the leading supplier of all forms of graphics technologies in all markets and to continue our mission of delivering the most advanced graphics technologies to mainstream markets."
So, at some time in the future, Caustic technology will be integrated into Imagination's POWERVR cores, which are licensed by the likes of TI and Intel, and we'll be viewing photo-realistic animations on our mobile phones. Cool. And let's not forget, Imagination also licenses its cores to the games console market and clearly has its sights set on other, larger, computing devices.
