According to an article on PC Perspective, Caustic Graphics has big plans, as the company is planning on launching a consumer level product in 2010. The interesting thing is that this product, currently going under the name of CausticTwo, will be quite different from the CausticOne.

The current hardware implementation of the CausticOne has been something of an enigma and all the details haven't been revealed, but the details that have now come to light are expected to cause quite a stir in the community. For starters, as many guessed, the card is only using two DDR2 SO-DIMM's which means that each of the processors on the card only has a 64-bit memory interface. This is a very narrow bus compared to modern graphics cards, but it gets better.

The CausticOne was never intended to be a retail product and it will be used as a means to launch the CausticRT platform and give developers early hands on with hardware. Amazingly, the CausticOne has a pair of custom programmed FPGA chips on it, each running at a mere 100MHz and drawing 20W of power each. The extra chip on the board is a PCI Express bridge chip which allows the two FPGA's to share the same bus.

The CausticOne is using a PCI Express x4 interface, but the CausticTwo will among other things get a PCI Express x16 interface. The CausticTwo will also be a single chip solution using a custom ASIC which is said to be operating at 350MHz while having four times the logic of the CausticOne. This is meant to give it as much as 14 times the performance of the CausticOne, which sounds insane in terms of performance improvement in modern computing.

The good news is that those using the CausticOne for development won't have to change a thing going to the CausticTwo. The benefit of course will be the huge performance increase compared to the CausticOne and it should be the only noticeable difference between the two cards to a developer.

On the software side of things, the CausticGL can be combined with OpenGL and it's also said that CausticGL will run without the hardware, but at a noticeable slower speed. Caustic Graphics is going to try to promote CausticGL as the standard API for raytracing and they seem to think they've got a good bet at making it.

It's going to be interesting to follow Caustic Graphics and see if they can deliver, but judging by the demo video's the company has posted, the hardware is very promising, albeit it seems to be a little bit limited at the moment, as the demo video is only show the raytraying in 640x480. However, it's worth remember that this is early hardware and early software and we've got a year or so to go until the retail products are out.

You can find PC Perspective's five pages of coverage here and Caustic Graphics has a couple of video's up on Vimeo which you can find here