Nvidia’s Next Lighting Tech Could Break Ray Tracing Out Of The Water


Ray tracer has been the buzzword technology for game graphics over the past few years. It’s amazing however, it’s also extremely taxing on hardware. Even the most powerful gaming computer can take up to 50 percent off framerates when ray-tracing is enabled. This forces players to use technologies like super sampling to make up the difference. Nvidia isn’t satisfied with status quo. Real-time path tracking is the next evolution of game lighting , and it looks stunning.



Path tracing is an advancement of ray-tracing. It replaces separate, intricate lighting computations for different effects with a single, unifying algorithm, basically boiling down the lighting of an entire 3D scene into a single massive equation that is filled with rays. It is a holistic approach that differs from traditional Ray Tracing, which tracks the path of light from multiple sources and points for reflection or refraction. Then it blends the results into more conventional “faked” lighting solutions such as shadow mapping, screen space reflections and so on.



It can be described as follows the following: If raytracing a scene involves a variety of advanced geometry equations then path tracing does it with one large equation for physics. You can see a more practical breakdown of the tech, combining both ray tracing and path tracer in the video below:



Like ray tracingand path tracing has been employed in pretended 3D animation for decades, and is now accessible for real-time game animation. Nvidia will be using the lessons learned from the former to apply them to the latter, and will present the results at GTC last Wednesday. HotHardware dissects the presentation and you can also see the benefits of natural light of full-blown path-tracing in the mogwai tiger demonstration.



The technology is far from being ready for full integration into real-time graphics, and is even further from being ready for gameplay. While Minecraft java are able to play with path tracing using Nvidia SDKs, it’s currently too heavy on hardware to be used in anything other than the demo phase or for inclusion in older games with low-detail like Minecraft and Quake II. Resolution and framerate issues are common as do the “noise” issue with the graphics, similar to high-ISO settings for a still camera. The algorithms that control the light have to improve. The technology is maturing, and has the potential to produce realistic lighting that is comparable to any on the market today. It also has performance that isn’t as demanding as ray-tracing or similar technology.

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