Tracer) chip and a more advanced programmable (2005) processor, the Ray Processing Unit (RPU) (2002–2009) ART VPS company (founded 2002), situated in the UK, sold ray tracing hardware for off-line rendering. The hardware used multiple specialized processors that accelerated ray-triangle intersection tests. Software provided integration with Autodesk Maya and Max data formats, and utilized the Renderman scene description language for sending data to the processors (the .RIB or Renderman Interface Bytestream file format). As of 2010, ARTVPS no longer produces ray tracing hardware but continues to produce rendering software. (2009–2010) Intel showcased their prototype "Larrabee" GPU and Knights Ferry MIC at the Intel Developer Forum in 2009 with a demonstration of real-time ray-tracing. Caustic Graphics produced a plug in card, the "CausticOne" (2009), that accelerated global illumination and other ray based rendering processes when coupled to a PC CPU and GPU. The hardware is designed to organize scattered rays (typically produced by global illumination problems) into more coherent sets (lower spatial or angular spread) for further processing by an external processor. Siliconarts developed a dedicated real-time ray tracing hardware (2010). RayCore (2011), which is the world's first real-time ray tracing semiconductor IP, was announced. Imagination Technologies, after acquiring Caustic Graphics, produced the Caustic Professional's R2500 and R2100 plug in cards containing RT2 ray trace units (RTUs). Each RTU was capable of calculating up to 50 million incoherent rays per second. Nvidia, partnering with Microsoft DirectX, announced the Nvidia RTX developer library in 2018, which promised fast real-time ray tracing solutions powered by hardware accelerated ray tracing (ASIC tensor cores) found in the Volta-generation GPUs. In October 2020, AMD announced further information regarding the "refresh" of the RDNA micro-architecture. According to the company, the RDNA 2 micro-architecture supports real-time hardware accelerated ray tracing. Intel released Arc Alchemist GPU in 2022, in which the GPU featured ray tracing acceleration core that are performing comparatively with RTX 3000 series mid-range GPU. Notes References Further reading State of the Art in Interactive Ray Tracing Ingo Wald and Philipp Slusallek, Computer Graphics Group, Saarland University, Review article to year 2001 3D rendering Graphics hardware Ray tracing (graphics)