3D-RING: Please tell us about yourself. How did you get into 3D graphics and how did you end up with ART?

Nick Gross My background is in video. Starting in medical videos, I moved on to corporate/ promotional videos and TV commercials. I worked mainly as a writer/director, but also produced and edited. For seven years I was based in Hong Kong where I started a 3D graphics company with some colleagues. The company – Virtually Real Ltd. was initially designed to provide content for my video business. We based the company on 3D Studio R3. In this way we were able to offer reasonably good graphics at low cost. It wasn’t long before the company took off and I soon abandoned video for 3D. Virtually Real was one of the first companies in Asia offering high end 3D graphics to be based on the PC and 3D Studio. At that time I realized that 3D graphics could be created very efficiently on generic computers, the problem was in the rendering – too much time spent working on the scene to make it render OK, and the reliance on general purpose processors for rendering was always a big problem.

3D-RING: What's inside the RenderDrive?

Nick Gross The driving force behind RenderDrive is the AR250 processor. This processor was designed by ART to perform the task of ray tracing. In this way RenderDrive performs the highly computationally intensive process of ray tracing in silicon, and allows us two principle advantages – image quality and speed. The AR250 will soon be replaced by the AR350 our next generation processor, which will be between 3 and 5 times faster.

3D-RING: Can you give us some info about future models, and how far the company will take the technology?

Nick Gross We are working on plans for several products based on our ray tracing processors. The next product will be the RD5000, based on the AR350 processor. RD5000 will be between 3 and 5 times faster than the current RD2000. In many cases RD5000 will provide ray traced quality images at scanline speeds.

3D-RING: Will any of the technology be considered for real-time application?

Nick Gross Real-time is currently way off on the horizon. We have a long way to go to bring real-time ray tracing to the market. It is, however, one of ART’ s goals.

3D-RING: Tell us about the ARC250 chip.

Nick Gross The AR250 was developed by ART in 1997. The AR250 represents a new class of graphics processor - the photorealistic rendering chip. Unlike other graphics chips that use simple 'painter' algorithms to generate images, the AR250 uses the physically-based ray tracing algorithm to generate images of very high quality. The AR250 is the first processor to use ART's dedicated ray tracing architecture, giving unrivaled rendering performance.

3D-RING: Give us an idea of the power of each chip, use a general purpose CPU as a reference for rendering purposes.

Nick Gross It is very difficult to give an accurate assessment of relative performance as it depends on so many variables. Perhaps one of the most useful rendering comparisons was performed by Viewpoint Digital using an model of a Harley Davidson Motorcycle. With this they compared RenderDrive against 3D Studio MAX’s native raytracing renderer. The scene rendered on RenderDrive in 40 minutes, in MAX it was 18 hours, 46 minutes. The RenderDrive image was fully ray traced, while the MAX scene was only partially ray traced.

3D-RING: Is the RenderDrive upgradeable?

Nick Gross RenderDrive software, which includes the firmware for RenderDrive and the plug-in software for the 3D application, is upgraded regularly. Owners of RenderDrive who subscribe to our extended warranty program receive these upgrades regularly at no extra charge. For the upcoming release of RD5000 we are offering a free upgrade for people buying RD2000.

3D-RING: Other than 3DSMAX, A/W and Renderman, what other applications will be supported in the future?

Nick Gross We have a long list of applications we want to support in the future. Currently, however, we are concentrating on the release of RenderMan and Maya interfaces, as well as continuing to improve our MAX interface. It is our goal for RenderDrive to be a high quality generic renderer for all major 3D applications. To that end we will continue to develop interfaces and encourage third parties to also develop interfaces for RenderDrive.