Ray tracing. Its a term youre going to hear a lot now that Nvidia has announced professional and consumer graphics cards that use this technique to produce some of the most life-like simulations possible in games and other animations. So, what is ray tracing exactly, and how does it differ from current graphics rendering techniques?
The oversimplified answer is that ray tracing models the behavior of light in real time as it intersects objects in a scene.
Its a feature that could lead to spectacular new graphics, but has been very hard to pull off because of the computational requirements. But Nvidia is tackling several issues facing ray tracing with a new graphics architecture known as Turing.
Turing is the biggest jump in graphics since CUDA arrived in 2006.
First, its tackling the problem of ushering in the next generation of computer graphics. Ray tracing is only one of many rendering techniques, but its where Nvidia is pushing hard because its especially suited for adding realistic, real-time lighting and effects.
The second issue is computational cost: the best Turing card for professional production costs $10,000, but it was even costlier to use ray tracing before. Whats new here is Nvidia is ready to bring ray tracing tech to consumer-level GPUs; that hasnt been done before.
Nvidias current graphics tech and most of the industrys simulates light and how light behaves in a given scene in a much simpler way, using something called rasterization. Like a painter painting layers upon a canvas, objects are rendered from back to front, so those in the front obscure the objects in the back.
This makes it hard to model a mirror, for example, because rasterization techniques cant track and model light itself. Its used often in real-time scenes because current-generation hardware cant keep up with the demands of simulating a complex scene in motion for something that requires it (say, a game or 3D animation).
Ray tracing models the behavior of light as it intersects objects This next generation of light simulations can model light in much more detail, without as much computational cost as before. Ray tracing models the behavior of light as it intersects with surfaces, materials, and moving objects.
A path of light that travels through a scene can be rendered more intricately now. With ray tracing, you could simulate how rays of light interact with objects, producing realistic reflection, refraction, and scattering effects in real time. Ray tracing can even detect and render mirrors, refract glass, figure out where light in a scene originates, and even determine the color of light as it passes through objects.
Heres an example of ray tracing working in real time during a Star Wars demo, using Nvidias professional Volta RTX graphics cards:
