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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.
quote: "and the help of Microsoft's new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API enhancements."
There's a red flag. Is this going to be yet another graphics "standard" for Windows only?
On one hand this technology is very exciting for any PC gamer. On other hand, MS locked new DirectX to Windows 10. As such, if you want this or that new feature enabled you could only do that on Win10. No thanks. I wills tick to gaming on Windows 7, that doesn't spy on me.
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.
The run of the mill for the past few years is that graphics cards are for mining the cryptocurrency flavour of the month and creating magical AI bots. This is the first time in years I have seen an article that refers to the use of graphics cards for actual graphics.
Tracing Rays Through the Cloud is a pretty good example of what was "next-gen" 6 years ago. None of the imagery there was generated real-time (just read the paper), but was still a good read about what goes into ray tracing. Intuitively we know what it is, but what it means for computation with reflective/refractive surfaces is a ton of work.
Of course, I won't believe it's real-time until it can render a house of mirrors at 60fps+.
Ray tracing's got what games crave.
It's got rays.
More GPU and CPU and that will be perfect for every type of surface in a computer game.
The need for more extreme processing is what will grow GPU and CPU sales.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
When I was in college, I took two semesters of graphics - but this was in the late DOS era. Early OpenGL existed, but because this was a real theoretical college class on graphics - we built a real raytracer from pure math from c-code and assembler rather than trying to stick to some arbitrary industry standard.
Cubes, spheres, torus, lighting, reflections, we did it all, piece by piece in glorious 640x350. It was ugly, and eerie, but really fascinating in terms of seeing pure mathematical expressions becoming 3d objects, pixel by pixel.
Since then, I've worked in several jobs frequently involving 'proper' graphics, even worked on a bunch of professional shipped games (mostly gameplay and systems, occasionally worked everywhere though) - and I can appreciate the need to use all the tricks that we do to make origami worlds, everything angled to the camera, but I really did enjoy creating worlds of actual objects, and having the camera pull its own shell of perspective out of the scene instead.
Which is how most assets are sort of created, actually, in the asset creation tools. You model the object, rip the polygons out how you can, create meshes and surfaces, and then try and cheat on everything to make it seem like the 'real' object again as cheaply as you can get away with. It's not quite raytracing outside a few tools, but it's an interesting hybrid.
Raytracers are a cool educational tool - but I can also see why they're only really trotted out when CPU manufacturers want to push for a race to buy more CPUs. They don't scale as well as modern techniques - and although there's some neat tricks you can do when you have your assets really 'present' mathematically (Demoscene stuff does this occasionally), it's usually not a better tradeoff than using the abstraction tools available to make it all work faster.
Ryan Fenton
Yeah, you have to love the graphic towards the bottom:
"Board Industry Support"
API: Microsoft.
That's it. The only option. Not very "broad".
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.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Zobeid says, "there must be no progress except on my terms! No Progress I say!!"
Here's a clue. This is an Nvidia technology. OMG, they left AMD out!
In a world where companies bring value-added and proprietary technologies to the table, this is what happens. Making technologies universal and commodities happens through competition.
If you wait for standards committees, cooperative ventures, FOSS, Vulkan, and everyone to get their shit together, progress takes years longer and sometimes stops entirely. Is that what you want? Because you shouldn't want that.
Proprietary standards are imperfect but at least DirectX works well across all of Windows. And Microsoft has made a profitable space where games can be sold and played, and money comes in to fund additional development. The forcing mechanism is competition which makes AMD, Linux, Vulkan, OSX want to catch up.
But yes, let's wait another 50 years for real-time ray tracing, for some mythical Open Source graphics hardware to appear. Also, we need open source CPUs, and all those missing graphics drivers. Can't have the current motherboards and chipsets, that's clearly untrustworthy, no one knows how they are built! Also, Linux is too much of a compromise for me, I insist upon having the original GNU operating system, currently at version 0.35 after 20 years of development!
Turns out raytracing isn't the holy grail of gaming graphics, although it's been hyped for so long that it seems like it. I always thought Pixar films were raytraced, but they were actually rasterized. Cars was their first film that used raytracing at all, and even then it was only during the big race (due to all the reflections, presumably). I do know that shows like Babylon 5 and I believe ST:TNG did use raytracing, though. Nvidia shows off 'realtime raytracing' every few years but it never takes off, presumably better overall results are still achieved via rasterization; sure, you can get sexy shadows and reflections, but your poly count will be at early PS3-era levels. Also, there are problems with raytracing and meshes that animate, like, say, humans, that make it much slower. This is why you almost always see it done with static meshes like cars or buildings. Turns out raytracing isn't even the ultimate rendering technology; Path Tracing is closer, if not theoretically perfect.
It's also worth noting that a form of raytracing has been in use in realtime graphics for a while, called relief mapping, which has made it into games.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.