NVIDIA has officially announced a new ray tracing technology called RTX at the on-going Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This technology is designed to provide developers with an extra layer of realism to add into their games.
For the uninitiated, ray tracing is a rendering technique used to generate an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects area shadows, surface reflections, as well as ambient occlusion on virtual objects.
Among the industry that relies heavily on ray tracing is the film industry. For example, the technique helps animation studios to create more life-like scenarios and characters. At the same time, it is also being used to blend computer generated assets or characters into the real world in order to deliver seamless realism in movies.
However, ray tracing requires significant computing power to the extent that they can’t be done in applications that utilize real time rendering such as games. NVIDIA’s new RTX Technology is meant to change that by being a highly optimized ray tracing technology which works in hand with the newly announced Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR) APIs via NVIDIA GameWorks Ray Tracing feature.
To be clear, consumers will not able to see RTX technology in action anytime soon though. As it stands, the technology is still very new and only available for games developers for the time being so that they will be able to find ways to implement RTX into their work.
Furthermore, RTX can only be supported by Volta GPUs which has yet been mass produced for the consumer market. Unless you want to count NVIDIA TITAN V which is something that not exactly meant for gaming anyway.
All in all, the new NVIDIA RTX Technology provides a path for game developers to further boost realism in their games through the usage of real time ray tracing which is something they might not able to be done before.
