Much like anyone in the graphics arena, Nvidia has been working a long time on actual real-time raytracing, the primary rendering technology used in the film industry. Today things get a step closer. First off, Microsoft announces DirectX Raytracing (DXR).
Microsoft will be releasing DirectX Raytracing (DXR). Nvidia, on their end, announces RTX on top of that, hardware and software combined that can make use of the DirectX Raytracing API. Nvidia on their end, have been working on ray tracing for over a decade, they took their software and hardware knowledge and release “NVIDIA RTX Technology’. NV partners with Microsoft to release an API and announced MS DirectX Raytracing API, added to that a layer called RTX. It is a combination of software and hardware algorithms. Nvidia will offer developers libraries that include options like Area Shadows, Glossy reflections and ambient occlusion.
With raytracing, you basically are mimicking the behavior, looks, and feel of a real-life environment in a computer generated 3D scene. Wood looks like wood fur on animals looks like actual fur, and glass gets refracted as glass etc, most films with CGI are rendered like this these days but require huge amounts of computational power, and many many hours to render a scene or a handful of frames. NVIDIA RTX will sit in-between the new Microsoft DXR API and basically helps hard and software to work with each other, RTX, much like gameworks, will add additional functionality in the form of real-time de-noiser and filters, reconstructing the final picture or pixel.
The new RTX API will however only work with Volta GPUS, well that and newer ones. That means Titan V currently is the only card that will support it, until newer cards are released. Indirectly the tensor cores in Volta can accelerate ray-tracing. The same tensor cores also can be to create say an AI de-noiser, using fewer samples and saving time. Nvidia mentioned that it expects the technology to find its way to games, and games would ship this year with DXR Raytracing features enabled, all about adding realism.
NVIDIA will offer gameworks libraries for RTX and is partnering up with Microsoft on this. RTX will find its way towards game applications and engines like Unreal Engine, Unity, Frostbite, they have also teamed up with game developers like EA, Remedy and 4A Games.
Now all we need is an affordable Volta GPUs.
AMD, however, merely has a short statement prepared for the Microsoft announcement:
‘AMD is collaborating with Microsoft to help define, refine and support the future of DirectX12 and ray tracing. AMD remains at the forefront of new programming model and application programming interface (API) innovation based on a forward-looking, system-level foundation for graphics programming. We’re looking forward to discussing with game developers their ideas and feedback related to PC-based ray tracing techniques for image quality, effects opportunities, and performance.’
