eli5: Could someone tell me what the big deal about RTX technology is?
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It simulates how real life looks in a way that human hands can’t and also it makes the life of graphics designers much easier which leads to more productivity.
computer makes sketchbooks then AI colors them and make animation more fluid like real world
For a long time, the lighting in computer games has been ‘faked’. Clever techniques are used to come kinda sorta close to what actual shadows or reflections or highlights would look like because actually simulating millions or billions of rays of light is too computationally expensive. For example, the texture of a wall behind a light would just be painted white to make the light seem bright. Areas near corners would have their textures darkened to make it seem like they’re shadowy. Foggy areas would actually be made of several floating flat panels of transparent texture, like looking through several sheets of glass.
RTX hardware is specially designed to calculate those light rays, how they reflect or get absorbed, and how they change color. It can do these calculations in real-time, which enables their use in interactive video games. The result is a 3D environment with much more realistic reflections, lighting, and shadows.
RTX is nvidia’s name for hardware support for ray tracing. AMD and Intel also have their own versions.
Ray tracing, as the name suggests, actually simulates light by tracing individual light rays.
Every game before RTX, and still most games now, don’t realistically simulate light. They use a technique called rasterization, which is a bunch of shortcuts that looks mostly accurate. But it has it’s drawbacks. Most infamously, rasterization cannot really do reflections. Game devs have had to implement workarounds for any kind of mirror or reflective surface.
While ray tracing is *way* more accurate, it traditionally took too much time to calculate. That’s why it wasn’t used in games, where things have to be calculated in real time. But it’s been used in animation for a long time.
**What is is:**
Every 3D video game you’ve ever played has basically been smoke and mirrors. We move triangles around in 2D, in a way that makes them look 3D (similar to how someone would draw a 3D cube on a flat piece of paper) and then we calculate the lighting in a hacky way that looks kind of real, then fake shadows using a bunch more hacky rendering tricks. Each new “breakthrough,” in game graphics has just been another hack on top of the pile. We’ve gotten really good at doing this, but it’s hacks on top of hacks on top of hacks and we’re never going to be able to get that last 10% we need to be completely photo-real.
Ray tracing solves this by just… simulating the way light works in the real world (more or less) by shooting out millions of rays and letting them bounce around. Conceptually speaking it’s the simplest and most obvious option, but it’s always been super computationally expensive. Movies have been doing it for decades, but they’ve required 30-60 minutes *per frame* to render (turns out simulating millions of rays of light is hard for a computer). RTX has special chips that just do ray tracing, and have managed to speed this process up to playable speeds.
**Why it matters:**
The cool thing about ray tracing is that its **the final step** in game graphics. No more hacks, it will just get faster with each new generation and in the future we’ll be able to do more and more light bounces (slightly more realistic lighting with each bounce). It also simplifies and speeds up the development process since the artists don’t have to rely on as many tricks and restrictions when lighting levels.
Since we’ve gotten so good at doing it the old way it can be hard to tell the difference at first, even in a side-by-side, but it’s the subtleties that make the difference. Just like when you look at a wax mannequin of a celebrity: You know there’s something off, but can’t quite place your finger on it. Ray tracing gives you those last little bits that you didn’t know were missing.
RTX technology is a type of computer graphics processing that allows for real-time rendering of 3D images. RTX uses ray tracing to create realistic looking graphics by tracing the path of light as it bounces off various objects in a scene. This results in more realistic looking shadows, reflections, and overall image quality.
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