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I remember Ray Tracing back when we were in university together, so I was anxious to see what he is doing at Imagination Technologies (LSE:IMG). The first news that I heard was that IMG’s share price was up 12% this morning. So I thought he must be doing something great. Then I heard that he was being disruptive. Surely, this was not the Ray Tracing I knew, so I sent my crack research staff to investigate. You can only imagine my surprise when I learned that this wasn’t my old schoolmate. Ray tracing is a new-school technology that will take computer graphics to a whole new level and should take Imagination Technologies’ share price along with it.
In a press release issued at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, IMG unveiled “a revolutionary new family of graphics IP cores that raises the bar for ray traced graphics to a dramatic new level, delivering astonishing realism and performance at mobile power budgets.” The company describes ray tracing as “Disruptive technology [that] enables interactive cinematic realism for mainstream devices.”
Ray tracing technology “simulates the path of light beginning at a source and then encountering an object that reflects it, refracts it, scatters it, or induces some other simulated optical effect on it before that ray passes through the image plane and into the viewer eye.” The important investment factor is not that this is a new technology, but that IMG is the first and only company that has made ray tracing scalable for use on mobile devices. That required a fundamental breakthrough in the algorithms used within ray tracing, and the result of that breakthrough, particularly relative to scalability, is what makes the innovation disruptive.
Imagination Technologies’ scalable ray tracing has been cited by Oscar-winner special effects guru Matt Pharr as “a quantum leap in image quality in mobile interactive graphics applications.” SEGA’s General Manager, Yasuhiro Kondo, said that he expects this “will create a great revolution in the graphics experience of the gaming market.”
Imagination’s ray tracing technology will be featured in a its Wizard graphics suite, enabling the Wizard products to provide “more immersive games and apps with real-life dynamic lighting models, supporting better lighting effects and like-life reflections.”
To put the icing on the cake, IMG has been able to accomplish this feat using far less power than any current rendering systems. The demand for this technology is going to redefine “fast and furious.” Hang on tight, investors. Fasten your seat belts and prepare for takeoff.
Having explained all of that, I still wonder what ever happened to my old pal, Ray Tracing. I think I’ll try to look him up on Facebook.
