News briefs

German researchers have developed a chip that can render complex graphics in real time. The chip could allow individuals or small organizations to easily perform complex graphics work. Currently, they must either use a single computer, which takes a long time to produce sophisticated graphics, or they must spend the money to have a cluster of computers yield results quickly. Saarland University scientists have developed an algorithm that lets a chip rapidly perform ray tracing. This approach is an alternative to the rasterization techniques - used in most of today´s graphics chips - that convert mathematical and digital information into a matrix of pixels. Ray tracing is a sophisticated approach that renders images in 3D environments by tracing the paths that light rays would take through a scene and calculating the reflection, refraction, or absorption that would occur when they hit an object. Unlike rasterization, ray tracing yields the information needed to compute shadows, reflections, and other effects necessary for high-quality images