I have been hearing about the new types RTX graphics cards that can do ray tracing real time. I know how the light radiation works in real life and previously -unless you wanted a still ray traced image that took long time to calculate- you had to use computer trickery to render effects that simulate in moving 3D. Now with the new RTX-type graphics cards how close are we to how the real light works in real-time computer 3D space? Just how does it work?
In: Technology
So how it works, is that an algorithm projects “rays” into a scene from the “camera”, and simulates them bouncing off objects towards the light source. Kind of the reverse of how we see in real life. It then uses this to approximate the colour value of the pixels. The end results is a much higher level of realism than what you could achieve with traditional rendering methods alone. Including accurate lighting, shadows, and realistic reflections off surfaces, without cheating using textures or additional objects.
Ray tracing has been used in professional CGI for a while now, but it’s very computationally expensive due to the complex math involved. So rending ray traced scenes in real time, at playable frame rates, is only a recent innovation. The technology is still very much in its infancy though. Nvidia’s method is to have a separate co-processor of sorts on their RTX cards to handle these calculations. But even then, games still take a huge performance hit with it turned on. It’ll take time for game engines and hardware to really start optimizing code for it. Which will likely happen with the next console generation.
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