Nvidia is known for buying many technologies and then simply starting to call them Nvidia. They did it for handhelds, they did it with Physics, they did it with 3DFX, but hey, that's all Nvidia now.

Rayscale is the next addition to the big and happy Nvidia-Borg family. This company is a start-up, based out of the University of Utah, and obviously, they did a good job with its ray tracing Lightnow application. Lightnow provides interactive feedback with physically-based ray tracing, as well as high-quality batch rendering. Lightnow actually reminds us of 3Dnow, something that AMD used some years ago.

As I did computer graphics at university and wrote a massive paper on ray tracing I can tell you that this is the only way that computer graphics can and will go in the future. Rayscale’s Lightnow can do simple ray tracing and global illumination, the most demanding and most realistic light. This is what Hollywood uses and this will come to games, but the hardware is still too weak to do real time ray tracing at 24 FPS or more.

You can learn more about Rayscale's website here and the original news picked up by pcper at Nvidia’s hideout is here.