Why would you use ray tracing for shadows, instead of shadow meshes? What are the different kinds of denoisers used for ray tracing? We give you the answers.
Five Things to Remember:
- Why do we bother to use ray tracing to render shadows? Because ray tracing gives you better visual quality for large area light soft shadows.
- You can produce physically correct, accurate penumbras with ray tracing, even with a really large area light source. This is not possible with shadow map-based techniques.
- Ray tracing also allows for more accurate geometry than character capsule shadows.
- Different denoisers are used for point lights, spot lights, directional lights, and rectangular lights. All pull from the G-Buffer and use hit distance, scene depth, normal, light size and direction to guide the filtering.
You can find six additional coffee-break length videos about ray tracing in games with RTX on the NVIDIA developer blog.
