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Some technology vendors claim to have solved the accelerated raytracing problem by using traditional algorithms along with GPU hardware.

If you've ever seen them demo their solutions you'll notice that while results may be fast—the image quality is underwhelming, far below the quality that raytracing is known for. The reason for this is that the more advanced lighting and shading effects—such as caustics, refraction and global illumination—cannot be accelerated using their methods. Why not? Incoherent rays.

In a true raytracing solution primary rays will bounce and scatter secondary rays throughout complex scenes. These secondary rays may be incoherent (i.e. reflect off in various directions) and it is these incoherent rays that are the key to creating the advanced effects required to achieve photorealism in complex images (numerous objects, refractive and reflective materials, rough surfaces).

The CausticOne, however, thrives in incoherent raytracing situations: encouraging the use of multiple secondary rays per pixel. Its level of performance is not affected by the degree of incoherence.

Other technology vendors claim to have solved the hardware-accelerated raytracing problem via traditional algorithms and parallel processing.

These vendors' solutions, however, ignore memory bandwidth, cache performance and parallel compute utilization. Only primary rays get a performance benefit with this approach.

CausticOne, on the other hand, delivers bandwidth-friendly ray processing that enables your CPU/GPU to shade with rasterization-like efficiency.