Another industry first is in the works this week during SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles – NVIDIA is demonstrating the world’s first fully interactive GPU-based ray tracer.

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 1920×1080 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).

NVIDIA Showing Interactive Ray Tracing on GPUs at SIGGRAPH - General Tech 2

Click on the picture for a better look a the reflected scene in the windows.