▷ What is nvidia's ray tracing? what is it for?

Ray Tracing is one of the themes of the year when it comes to the world of PC video games. This technique is extremely interesting since it can be a breakthrough in the world of video games and has been incorporated into the new Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080 and RTX 2070 graphics cards.

Do you want to know what it is for? Stay with us and we will show you?

Ray tracing is a rendering technique based, as its name suggests, on tracing a large number of ray rays from light sources, calculating and analyzing the bounces of each ray with the different objects and based on this, giving lighting with the objective of obtaining the most realistic lighting possible to create credible 3D models. Come on, that ray tracing looks for a lighting according to reality simulating by computer, with millions of complex calculations, the path followed by light to the 'camera'.

This is not a precisely new technology, but was first known in 1979, introduced by Turner Whitted. In fact, it is widely used in all kinds of 3D rendered videos and photos. To give you an idea, every movie today that uses computer images, especially the most realistic ones, uses ray tracing. That is, we have it from fairly basic renderings like the one we show you here above, which is nothing more than a simple demonstration, to basically any Hollywood blockbuster you can imagine, where you can hardly distinguish what is generated by computer from what no, even well-known animations like Pixar's.

Everything sounds great, but the question that will come to your mind the most will be the following: why isn't real-time ray tracing used in games? Well, rendering a single photograph like the previous one using ray tracing could take minutes or hours, while for a movie (to give an example) gigantic and extremely expensive rendering farms are used that will probably cost millions and take hours or days to complete one of these processes. At least until now, it was not assumable to make use of it in video games.

The rendering technology used in video games as an alternative to ray tracing is rasterization, where the objects that are on the screen are created from a mesh of thousands of virtual polygons, and with the combination of various technologies such as environmental occlusion or Shaders, lighting, and shadows are typically calculated based on the angle between the vertices of each polygon and the light source, a less realistic approach-based method, but much faster than ray tracing.

Now let's take a look at the real-time ray tracing implementation that NVIDIA has recently introduced boasting its pioneering status as the ' holy grail of computer graphics '. The peculiarity of the implementation is the use of hardware dedicated exclusively to ray tracing such as RT Cores, which in turn will be accelerated by Tensor Cores, the latter dedicated to optimizing the process using artificial intelligence. According to NVIDIA, this means that a single RTX graphics card can perform these types of operations in real time with a performance similar to that of the DGX supercomputer, which costs $ 60, 000.

The NVIDIA real-time ray tracing has the drawback that the technology is not fully used, that is, a number of rays is not calculated as large as in the most photorealistic renderings, we could call it a " partial ray tracing " that it is limited to making the most relevant calculations to illuminate the scene. So the visual jump is not as big as what you see in some photographs or in movies. In any case, an image is worth a thousand words, and we leave you here the photographs of some of the ray tracing demonstrations shown by NVIDIA at Gamescom 2018:

In the comparisons where we observe "RTX On" and "RTX Off", it should be noted that we are not necessarily faced with the use of ray tracing, but that RTX also includes various artificial intelligence functionalities. In any case, it serves to give us a different idea of ​​what is to come. We believe the Shadow of the Tomb Raider video very faithfully shows the differences in lighting and shadows.

Unfortunately, there are more drawbacks to be aware of. On the one hand, it is important to clarify (although it falls from the drawer) that to enjoy ray tracing in a game, it must be supported. There are already a certain number of games that will support it in the future, current and new, but it will be a matter of months or years to see if it proliferates. To finish, it is possible that disabling ray tracing in real time can give a remarkable performance level advantage, causing certain users to skip it.

If all the information announced by the company is true and RTX proliferates in games, it will be an effective and efficient implementation of Ray Tracing in real time, since they will succeed in this aspect to any previous graphics card with a massive advantage.

After all this information, there is a question that many of you will come to mind: let's see, is it worth buying an RTX to enjoy ray tracing in games? In equal parts, there are media and users recommending "buying because this is an incredible advance that you cannot miss" , such as "not buying because technology is a scam of marketing" .

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We give you the most sensible answer: At the time of writing this article, nothing can be said about the success, usefulness and importance of ray tracing in games. We will still have to wait weeks or months. First, you must know the performance of the new RTX in scenarios that do not use ray tracing to see if the generational jump without taking this aspect into account is worth it ( since not everything will revolve around RTX technology in games). Second, see the actual implementations that the games will make in the coming months, since now we only have a few demo accounts and there is not enough information to confirm anything.

Ray Tracing is here to stay. It is already part of the DirectX 12 API and more and more games will implement it. Knowing whether or not it will be worth it is just a matter of time. Did you like our article? We want to know your opinion!