Real time ray-tracing - the next big step in computer graphics

[DEALUX]

Game Developers Conference - NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA RTX, a ray-tracing technology that brings real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to content creators and game developers.

 

NVIDIA RTX is the product of 10 years of work in computer graphics algorithms and GPU architectures. It consists of a highly scalable ray-tracing technology running on NVIDIA Volta architecture GPUs. Architected to support ray tracing through a variety of interfaces, NVIDIA partnered closely with Microsoft to enable full RTX support for applications that use Microsofts new DirectX® Raytracing (DXR) API.

 

Long considered the definitive solution for realistic and lifelike lighting, reflections and shadows, ray tracing offers a level of realism far beyond what is possible using traditional rendering techniques. Real-time ray tracing replaces a majority of the techniques used today in standard rendering with realistic optical calculations that replicate the way light behaves in the real world, delivering more lifelike images.

 

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.

 

Ray tracing has been used for years to pre-render lifelike worlds in movies. But until now, it has been too computationally demanding to be practical for real-time, interactive gaming, which requires fast frame rates and low latency. NVIDIA RTX overcomes those limitations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

So NVIDIA have developed a clever algorithm in collaboration with Microsoft (with DX12\DirectX Raytracing) that can enable next-gen GPUs to do real time light calculations that were previously impossible to do before. This means that in the next few years we will finally have photorealistic graphics in video games. This is as big of a leap as the jump from 2D to 3D.

[Vanzant]

Awesome! So now, instead of waiting 5-6 years it's only going to take 15 years for a company like Rockstar to make a quality video game. Imagine your 60 year old liver spotted hands should be ready when GTA VII rolls out! I bet game designers are gonna get pumped to the max just thinking about spending a whole days shift making an ice cube LOOK REAL in a glass of water your video game character may or may not even interact with!

[Cosmic Gypsy]

The big step now will be trying to match AI to the graphics, we'll have video games with Avatar level graphics and Far Cry 3 level AI still in 5 years.

[Otter]

This is f*cking cool, particularly as a real-time animation resource. Awesome.

[RedDagger]

I unno real time raytracing has been somewhat of a thing with tech demos for a while now, of course here it looks like a finished product due to the neat noise reduction but it's still just another tech demo - call me when they're using consumer level hardware to render a complex gameplay scene at 60FPS on top of all the other gameplay processing, and then we can talk about getting this into games. 'til then, it's just another tech demo.

 

That said, that noise reduction is feckin' magic, good lord.

[justinlynch3]

If PS5 uses NVIDIA tech instead of sticking to AMD then we know what they've been planning.

 

 

Yea I wish, this is probably 3 or 4 generations away for consoles. lol

[Jason]

Yea I think we're gonna be waiting a while before this becomes viable and standard, but it's cool to finally see it become doable. Nice to see movement on visual fidelity in general too, feels like we've been in a slump since the jump to 360/PS3.

[DEALUX]

Awesome! So now, instead of waiting 5-6 years it's only going to take 15 years for a company like Rockstar to make a quality video game. Imagine your 60 year old liver spotted hands should be ready when GTA VII rolls out! I bet game designers are gonna get pumped to the max just thinking about spending a whole days shift making an ice cube LOOK REAL in a glass of water your video game character may or may not even interact with!

Not really. I think ray tracing can in fact reduce the amount of work that is needed to create assets and stuff related to game graphics. As a byproduct of the light simulations you also get shadows, blur, depth of field, ambient occlusion, etc. There will no longer be a need to tweak these effects separately. The other benefit is that you can kinda do away with raster graphics (i.e. bitmap textures) entirely given that color (and thus texture) features are calculated on the fly by the ray tracing algorithm. This could mean potentially infinite resolution (or rather vector graphics like) shadows and surface detail depending on how many samples per pixels can be achieved (though this makes sense because zooming in on a surface will make the algorithm recalculate everything which will keep the same resolution as before, provided that no bitmaps are being used on that surface).

 

Here's a demo where you can see in the beginning that most of the assets are not textured but they get their detail from the light calculations themselves.

 

 

 

 

Yea I think we're gonna be waiting a while before this becomes viable and standard, but it's cool to finally see it become doable. Nice to see movement on visual fidelity in general too, feels like we've been in a slump since the jump to 360/PS3.

The UE4 demos ran on 4 x Titan Vs apparently but the difference is that now NVIDIA and Microsoft are actually interested in bringing ray tracing to video games. Edited March 27, 2018 by Dealux

[DEALUX]

Well, NVIDIA did it again. They now have a GPU that can render 10 billion rays (bounces) in real time. That's more than 5 bounces at 1080p 30/60. 10 more years and we'll have raytracing in video games.

 

 

[elfoam]

Welcome to the Amiga demo scene circa 1988.. geesus. No wonder games went to sh*t, so far behind the ball

[DEALUX]

Ray tracing in Amiga demos? I very much doubt that.

 

 

[Dryspace]

On 3/27/2018 at 3:00 AM, Dealux said:

Here's a demo where you can see in the beginning that most of the assets are not textured but they get their detail from the light calculations themselves.

Of course the assets are textured. Light can not impart detail, it can only expose it. When you turn the lights off in your room, the details still exist--you just can't see them. In the beginning of the video you are seeing untextured geometry.

 

In order to achieve realistic surfaces via nothing more than the interaction of light and geometry, the geometry would have to be accurate down to the molecular level, which is clearly impractical, even for non-real-time purposes. As such, detail must be faked with textures and shaders.

 

What I'd like to see is a move toward more procedural definition of surface appearance. Textures are not a viable solution into the future, in terms of both hardware and manpower requirements.

 

On 3/27/2018 at 3:00 AM, Dealux said:

NVIDIA and Microsoft are actually interested in bringing ray tracing to video games.

Whether that's true or not, it's also unfortunately true that Microsoft's interest in video games begins and ends with the XBox.

Edited September 25, 2018 by Dryspace
Typo

[SilverRST]

I'm not so sure about that ray tracing thingy. Due to exorbitant retarded prices. how can nVidia expect it to be popular and getting it standard?
I haven't heard from HairWorks in ages except in The Witcher 3(?) and PhysX died a long time ago? 1400$ for 2080Ti, GTFO.

At this price rates, people will likely move on to consoles and bye bye reeey treeecing.

[Sanches]

Truly beautiful scenes. Metro Exodus hypes RTX as much as possible. Im going to buy Metro 100% and i wonder how much ingame experience will i miss without RTX.