Nvidias Next Lighting Tech Could Blow Ray Tracing Out Of The Water
Ray tracer is the most well-known technology in game graphics for the last few years. It's extremely impressive however it can be extremely demanding on hardware. Even the most powerful gaming PC could take up to 50 percent off framerates if ray tracing is enabled. My Games This requires gamers to include technology like super sampling to make up for the difference. Naturally, Nvidia isn't accepting the status as it is. Real-time path tracking is the next step of game lighting , and it looks incredible.
Path tracing is a more subtle variation of the ray tracing. It replaces separate, complex lighting algorithms for various effects with a single, unifying algorithm, which boils down the lighting of the 3D scene into one vast equation that is stuffed with rays. It's a holistic approach, in contrast to traditional ray tracing that tracks the path of light coming from various sources and points of reflection or refraction. and then blends the results with more traditional "faked" rasterized lighting solutions such as shadow mapping and screen space reflections.
It can be summarized as the following: If raytracing a scene uses a number of advanced geometry equations , then path tracing is one large physics equation. The video below shows the more in-depth breakdown of the technology, which combines both path tracing as well as ray tracer.
Path tracing is similar to ray tracing and has been used in pre-recorded 3D animations for decades. It is now being made available for real-time 3D animation. Nvidia will use the lessons learned from the former to apply them to the latter and will show the results at GTC on Wednesday. HotHardware breaks it down, but you can still appreciate the advantages of natural light of full-blown path tracking in the mogwai Tiger demo.
The technology is a long way from ready for full integration into real-time graphics, and is even further from being ready for gaming. While developers can play around with path tracing with Nvidia SDKs, it's currently too taxing on hardware for anything but the demo stage or for the inclusion of older games with low resolution like Minecraft and Quake II. Framerate and resolution issues are aplenty and so does the "noise" issue in the graphics, which is similar to high-ISO settings for a still camera. The algorithms that control the light have to improve. The technology is maturing, and it has the potential to create real-life lighting that is superior to anything currently available. It also has a speed that isn't as demanding as ray-tracing or similar technology.
