NVIDIA RTX Technology To Usher In Real-Time Ray Tracing Holy Grail of Gaming Graphics (hothardware.com)

HotHardware writes: NVIDIA has been dabbling in real-time ray tracing for over a decade. However, the company just introduced NVIDIA RTX, which is its latest effort to deliver real-time ray tracing to game developers and content creators for implementation in actual game engines. Historically, the computational horsepower to perform real-time ray tracing has been too great to be practical in actual games, but NVIDIA hopes to change that with its new Volta GPU architecture and the help of Microsoft's new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API enhancements. Ray tracing is a method by which images are enhanced by tracing rays or paths of light as they bounce in and around an object (or objects) in a scene. Under optimum conditions, ray tracing delivers photorealistic imagery with shadows that are correctly cast; water effects that show proper reflections and coloring; and scenes that are cast with realistic lighting effects. NVIDIA RTX is a combination of software (the company's Gameworks SDK, now with ray tracing support), and next generation GPU hardware. NVIDIA notes its Volta architecture has specific hardware support for real-time ray tracing, including offload via its Tensor core engines. To show what's possible with the technology, developers including Epic, 4A Games and Remedy Entertainment will be showcasing their own game engine demonstrations this week at the Game Developers Conference. NVIDIA expects the ramp to be slow at first, but believes eventually most game developers will adopt real-time ray tracing in the future.

Comments

Raytracing does not produce photorealistic images

[Anonymous Coward]

Ray tracing is great for specular (not spectacular...) reflections, i.e. light interacting with mirror-like, non-diffusing surfaces. It produces highlights, (perfect) refraction, (perfect) reflections and hard shadows. Anything else is not the domain of ray tracing. You can have fuzzy effects with ray tracing, but they come at an extreme processing power cost. Some effects are practically impossible to calculate with ray tracing. Ray tracing can contribute a small part of the rendering equation (the specular part) to photorealistic images, but it does not by itself create photorealism.

Re:Consoles

[Holi]

Pretty sure I haven't heard of a Volta based console.

Consoles will be relevant in the discussion when they launch a console that will support this tech. Until then it's a PC ray-traced world.