Nvidia's Upcoming Lighting Technology Could Break Ray Tracing Out Of The Water

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Ray tracer has been the most popular technology used in game graphics for the last few years. It's extremely impressive however, it can be extremely taxing on hardware. Even the most souped-up gaming PC typically takes up to a 50 percent reduction in framerates when ray tracing , which forces players to layer on tech such as super sampling to make up a portion of the difference. Nvidia isn’t content with the status of the art. Real-time path tracking is the next stage of game lighting , and it looks amazing.
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Path tracing is a subtle evolution of the ray tracing. It replaces the separate, complicated lighting computations for different effects by a single, unified algorithm, essentially boiling down the lighting of an entire 3D scene into a single vast equation that is stuffed with rays. It's a holistic approach contrasted to conventional ray tracing which tracks the path of light coming from various sources and points of reflection or refraction, and then blends these results with more conventional "faked" lighting solutions that are rasterized, such as shadow mapping and screen space reflections.



It can be summarized as this the following: If raytracing a scene involves a variety of advanced geometry equations , then path tracing does it with one big physics equation. The video below shows an in-depth explanation of the technology, which combines both path tracing and ray tracing.



Like ray tracing, path tracing has been used in pretended 3D animation for a long time, and is only now becoming accessible for real-time game animation. Nvidia is taking the lessons it's learned from the former and transferring them to the latter, showing the results at GTC last week. HotHardware breaks it down, but you can still appreciate the benefits of natural light from full-blown path tracking in the Mowai Tiger demo.



The technology is far from being fully integrated into real-time graphics and even more far from being ready for gameplay. While developers can play with path tracing using Nvidia SDKs, it's currently too taxing on hardware for anything other than the demo phase, or in the inclusion of older games with low resolution like Minecraft and Quake II. There are issues with framerates and resolutions, as well as a "noiseissue with graphics that is similar to high ISO settings on a still-camera. The algorithms that govern the lighting simply have to get better. The technology is maturing, and it could produce realistic lighting that is comparable to any currently available. It also has a performance that isn't as demanding as ray tracing or similar tech.

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