BAD HARDWARE WEEK

LONDON — Caustic Graphics Inc. (San Francisco, Calif.) is a startup company that claims to have made a breakthrough in the hardware acceleration of ray-traced graphics. Caustic said it's first-generation technology will deliver an average 20-fold increase in the speed used to create 3-D imagery for film and video, game development, as well as automotive and consumer product design. The second generation of Caustic's technology, due early in 2010, is expected to gain an additional order of magnitude in performance, offering a 200 times speed-up over current graphics products.