ODM Mobile PowerVR ICs buys raytracing company

Interesting, perhaps you remember PowerVR, back from the early 3dfx/nvidia days ? Well the main company behind it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire for $27 million in cash Caustic Graphics Inc., a developer of real-time ray tracing graphics. Ray tracing has long been seen as an emerging technology for high-end graphics and represents a new arrow in Imagination's quiver as it battles with graphics cores from rival ARM Ltd.

Ray tracing, called the Holy Grail in graphics by analysts, is a technique for rendering 3-D images with complex lighting models to achieve photographic realism. Caustic (San Francisco) claimed in March 2009 it had a hardware accelerator that could lower the cost of ray tracing and merge the lighting models with traditional polygon-based graphics rendering.

Imagination said it will add Caustic's accelerator to its PowerVR graphics cores "in the medium term" to attack professional and specialized graphics markets as well as some mainstream consumer markets. The company's cores are widely used in consumer and mobile SoCs today, but are increasingly coming under pressure from ARM's Mali cores.