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Nvidia And Microsoft Lay Foundation For Photorealistic Gaming With Real-Time Ray Tracing

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Various players in the computer graphics industry have been working with ray tracing technologies for many years. However, up until now, real-time ray tracing for games has been sort of like chasing the "holy grail" of game rendering. In general, the horsepower for it just wasn’t there, until very recently that is. Nvidia and Microsoft have both stepped out with announcements today that usher in the promise of real-time ray tracing, with specific tools for game developers and content creators. For its part, Microsoft has announced DirectX 12 Ray Tracing, or DXR for short, which introduces new rending constructs for the API to support ray tracing. Meanwhile, Nvidia brings its new RTX technology to bear, a combination of both hardware support in its GPUs and software tools for developers bundled into its GameWorks SDK library.

Remedy Entertainment

So what's so magical about ray tracing that affords the technology the ability to render photorealistic images like the picture you see above? Ray tracing is a rendering technique that literally traces the path of light rays in an image as they illuminate a scene, bounce off objects and fill in areas around them, people or whatever is being rendered. When done right, ray tracing can render incredibly life-like imaging with much more accurate shadowing, reflections, lighting and color effects, as well as more realistic liquid, fire and smoke rendering effects that look more natural and less “game-like” to the human eye. Until now, the computational throughput required for real-time ray tracing in game engines was too great to be practical, and the technology was limited to applications like still image 3D rendering for design, and the film industry.

Nvidia

Nvidia noted today that, along with support for Microsoft DXR, the company’s RTX technology will enable real-time ray tracing in games utilizing its new Volta GPU architecture, that also has dedicated hardware on board to offload ray tracing workloads. Nvidia noted that RTX will also utilize the Tensor cores on board Volta for ray tracing, though these compute engines are typically utilized for machine learning applications.

“Real-time ray tracing has been a dream of the graphics industry and game developers for decades, and NVIDIA RTX is bringing it to life,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. “GPUs are only now becoming powerful enough to deliver real-time ray tracing for gaming applications, and will usher in a new era of next-generation visuals.”

Nvidia isn’t quoting performance figures currently but noted that its Volta GPU is significantly faster than the previous generation Nvidia GPU architectures with ray tracing workloads. As such, Volta will be the primary development vehicle for game developers and other content creators looking to implement the rendering effect in real-time. Nvidia did note, however, that any DX12 class GPU will be able to run Microsoft’s new DXR (DirectX Ray Tracing) API, obviously with varying degrees of performance, depending on the graphics card in play. "DirectX Raytracing is the latest example of Microsoft's commitment toward enabling developers to create incredible experiences using cutting-edge graphics innovations," added Max Mullen, Microsoft development manager for Windows Graphics and AI.

Nvidia

Nvidia notes its GameWorks SDK has also been updated with a ray-tracing support for developers that want to take advantage of Nvidia RTX technology and Microsoft DXR. This week at GDC 2018 in San Francisco, multiple game devs including Epic Games and Remedy Entertainment will be demonstrating their game engines with the technology, though Nvidia notes there will be a longer view timeline of industry adoption for real-time ray tracing to come to future game titles.

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