Nvidia started out as a small joint-venture company in 1993. Their first graphics card came in 1995 and from then on it it consolidated its position on the graphics market as the only real competitor for the acclaimed 3DFX. Unfortunately, in 2000, Nvidia managed to acquire 3DFX entirely and from that moment, the Santa Clara company chose the path of the monopole. Since 2000, Nvidia practically monopolized the handheld graphics sector, they’ve tried to bring down ATI, they acquired Ageia with its PhysX processor, plus they are now planning the total annihilation of CPUs. In order to bring CPUs down, NVIDIA is proud to announce that it acquired yet another company, Rayscale, specializing in ray-tracing technology.

Ryscale is a start-up based out of University of Utah and they managed to impress Nvidia with their advanced ray-tracing Lightnow application. Lightnow provides interactive feedback with physically-based ray-trace models, as well as high quality batch rendering. Although it’s not yet a set of processor instructions, Lightnow somehow reminds us of 3Dnow!, a set of multimedia instruction that was first implemented in AMD’s K6 and K7 CPUs

If we are to listen to Intel and 3D graphics specialists, it looks like ray-tracing is the only way that computer graphics can and will go in the future. Rayscale’s Lightnow is very proficient at ray-tracing and global illumination providing the most demanding and most realistic light. This is what Hollywood uses and it will surely come to games in the next years. For the moment, as Intel has demonstrated several months ago, the current and the next-gen hardware will still be fairly weak to do real time ray tracing at 24 FPS or more.

For more info on Rayscale’s technologies visit their official page.