Ray tracing will soon revolutionize the way video games look. Ray tracing simulates how rays of light hit and bounce off of objects, enabling developers to create stunning imagery that lives up to the word “photorealistic”. This video provides an overview of how the technology works.
Five Things to Remember:
- Ray tracing defined: a primitive to query the intersections of rays against some geometry.
- Shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion can be rendered in-game at a dramatically higher level of quality using ray tracing.
- Ray tracing also can be used in non-rendering applications, including audio simulation in VR, physics/collision detection, and AI.
- Rendering with ray tracing usually requires many samples for high quality results; from a few hundred to a few thousand…
- …But high quality results are possible with few samples per pixel + denoising
You can find six additional coffee-break length videos about ray tracing in games with RTX on the NVIDIA developer blog.
