The ray-tracing technique for generating 3D images is an extremely processor-intensive proposition that doesn’t lend itself to gaming (or real-time anything, for that matter), but all of that may be about to change. Caustic Graphics, a San Francisco-based start-up founded by former Apple employee James McCombe, claims that its dedicated ray tracing card will produce photorealistic graphics at a rate 20 times faster than products currently available. And if that weren’t enough, their new CausticRT platform has the potential to perform the operations a whopping 200 times faster — possibly fast enough for a photorealistic gaming platform. The second generation technology should be unleashed sometime in mid-2010, while the CausticOne card will get its official announcement on April 23 of this year.

[Via Business 2.0 Press]