The AR350 is the company's second-generation ray tracing processor. The AR350 features a memory manager to access local DRAM, an on-chip data cache to reduce the bandwidth required of the host bus and two 3D rendering cores.
Each rendering core performs both the geometry and the shading operations of the ray tracing algorithm. The geometry co-processor of each core is capable of performing a ray / triangle intersection calculation every processor cycle. The shading co-processor is completely end-user programmable through the RenderMan Shading Language.
A simple interface between AR350s produces a scaleable architecture with good processor linearity. The AR350 uses a 0.22-micron line size and is delivered in an SFBGA package for integration into the heart of ART VPS rendering devices. The AR350 delivers four times the rendering speed of the AR250.
The first ray tracing chip - the AR250 - represented a new class of graphics processor - the photorealistic rendering chip. Unlike other graphics chips that use simple 'painter' algorithms to generate images, ART's processors use the physically-based ray tracing algorithm to generate images of stunning quality. The AR250 was the first processor to use ART's dedicated ray tracing architecture, giving unrivaled rendering performance.
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