It seems that the best way to produce realistic reflections in today's graphics, although quite an expensive one too, is ray-tracing. The enthusiast of this rendering solution was up until now Intel, which made demonstrations in the past by using the tracing of light rays with some versions of Quake, while on a multiprocessor system. It looks like Nvidia has adopted the technology too, as the green company came to Siggraph to show off a demo of real-time GPU ray-tracing being rendered on four of its multi-GPU Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing Systems.

The demo featured a full HD resolution (which is 1920 x 1080 pixels). It showed a green-themed Bugatti Veyron, and managed to produce up to 30 FPS, while having image-based lighting paint shader, ray-traced shadows, as well as reflections and refractions.

"Based purely on NVIDIA GPU technology, the ray-tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application. At three bounces, performance is demonstrated at up to 30 frames per second (fps) at HD resolutions of 1920x1080 for an image-based lighting paint shader, ray-traced shadows, and reflections and refractions running on four next-generation Quadro GPUs in an NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2100 D4 Visual Computing System (VCS)," is stated in Nvidia's press release.

Nvidia has said few words about ray-tracing in the past, when the first Quadro Plex D box was launched. The external boxes are packed up with up to four workstation-class graphics cards and are able to output on eight displays at once. The connection between the box and the workstation is made via a simple PCI Express card. The boxes are intended for styling and design, geosciences and scientific visualization industries, and are capable of handling extremely large 3D models, datasets and power walls.

According to Nvidia, "The new Quadro Plex series provides performance improvements of up to 100% over previous versions and offers massively parallel processing capabilities using multiple Quadro graphics cards for visualization, large-scale projection and display, or computation with the NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Computing Processor".

"For the first time, the Quadro Plex D Series, with our latest Quadro GPU technology, brings visual supercomputing to the deskside, combining advanced visualization and computational performance together in a Quadro system," said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. "From the unprecedented power of the Quadro Plex to our Quadro FX mobile notebook solutions, professionals across multiple markets can now get the level of Quadro performance that best meets their individual visualization needs."