Brigade Officially Announced, Powerful Graphics API Aiming To Replace DirectX or OpenGL

Remember Brigade Engine? No? Well shame on you because OTOY has announced that game developers worldwide will be able to leverage Brigade – its path tracing and rendering technology for photorealistic next-generation games – through Amazon EC2 in the second half of the year. 

According to the press release, OTOY is concurrently launching a seamless physically-based art pipeline for Brigade, shared with OTOY’s OctaneRender software and supported across all major 3D modeling packages.

Here is what OTOY aims to achieve:

• Expanding the Brigade developer program – Through Brigade, OTOY is now helping leading game developers explore the potential of cloud computing for the delivery of next-generation games. Brigade is a powerful graphics API that can easily replace Microsoft DirectX or OpenGL graphics within popular game engines such as Epic Games’ Unreal Engine or Unity, serving as a backend for superior graphics without disrupting the game logic. Harnessing the power of the cloud, Brigade’s sophisticated technology enables real-time ray tracing and path tracing of game environments, simulating light as it appears in the real world to deliver in-game interactive graphics that are on par with the best movie effects of today. Frames that traditionally have taken minutes or longer to render now do so in fractions of a second, allowing for a fluid game experience streamed to consumers’ homes without the need for expensive hardware.

• Next generation final render art pipeline for Brigade, powered by OctaneRender, supported across all major 3D modeling tools – OctaneRender, OTOY’s acclaimed rendering software, and Brigade now share the same code base, allowing extraordinarily complex 3D scenes, materials, lighting and objects rendered in OctaneRender to be effortlessly loaded into Brigade for gaming and other interactive applications. Similarly, Brigade is now compatible with 15 of the top modeling programs through OctaneRender plugins. The end result is a pain-free art pipeline that lets developers easily transition detailed game assets from the program of their choosing to Brigade.

• Developing via Brigade on Amazon EC2 – Delivering physically accurate photorealistic games demands a compute-intensive environment that’s affordable, scalable, and up to the task. In the second half of 2014, OTOY will make Brigade Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) available via Amazon EC2 to facilitate testing and development of next-generation games.

Jules Urbach, Founder and CEO at OTOY, said:

“We’re quickly approaching a time where rasterization-based gaming APIs won’t be able to keep pace with the realism gamers demand. As media and entertainment companies look to leverage existing assets across movie, television, and game mediums, and as we face an ever more connected future, the top game studios know that the cloud is the logical solution. We have the distinct pleasure of working with several premiere developers using Brigade to explore jaw-dropping next-generation games, and with today’s announcement we look forward to getting Brigade into even more developers’ hands in the near future.”

Enjoy!

Source: http://www.dsogaming.com/news/brigade-officially-announced-powerful-graphics-api-aiming-to-replace-directx-or-opengl/

My computer sucks too much for me to be excited but it sounds cool.

So after DX, OpenGL, Mantle there is now a fourth major API. Game developers will just love the amount of choices.

But It's true about raster-based APIs. They need to die first if we want to achieve real realism. Tracing is the future of all rendering.

It's true that the images look a lot more real than with any other API, but only when they are not moving.

Where does that grainy look come from? Because if it's a filter they add on purpose, it's stupid.

Each point is where a Ray hits a surface, so to achive real-time framerates they just simulate as many rays they can in the target frametime. when everything is static they can use the previous frame's traces to fill out the image, but when anything including the camera moves they have to do all new traces. They are working on filtering to better blend the points to reduce the grain but basically they are banking on computing power to allow them to brute force through the problem. Hence it being a primarily a Cloud rendering API.

Thanks for the explanation, but that only means that until GPUs are powerful enough, it's useless for games.

And since nowadays most PC games are upscaled ports of console games, we won't see many (or any?) games using it until at least the next gen of consoles.

First real ray tracing games then?