In 2009 when Nvidia started CUDA, a bunch of startup companies rushed into this new market. One of them was Otoy, with their physical-based GPU renderer Octane. Today Otoy is among the leaders in rendering engine technology as well as graphic computing cloud solutions. In March 2014 they announced their real-time GPU path-tracer for game engines and once again was leading the future of 3DCG.

For awhile, Otoy was only supporting CUDA technology but Brigade is also optimized for OpenCL, the technology adopted by AMD. We’re still unsure of what hardware is being targeted by this real-time renderer. Hopefully the next generation console running mainly AMD Radeon GPU will have enough room to see this path-tracing deployed in future titles. An alternative solution has already been announced by Otoy: an AWS cloud AMI distribution is soon to be ready on the Amazon market. As gaming in the cloud is running but not yet affordable for the average user, this move is better understood as a strategic plan to lead this coming new business.