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
I’ve written a longer answer to this before, but here’s a summary: traditional ray (and/or path) tracing is slow, because there are so many rays to simulate and the simulation of an individual ray is slow if the scene has a lot of complexity. RTX-style ray tracing improves these in 3 ways.
– The GPU is used for ray tracing instead of the CPU, which works because GPUs are designed to do thousands of computations at the same time.
– Individual ray simulation is made faster by dedicated hardware on the GPU that can be used to quickly test which objects and rays can intersect, which usually takes a lot of time.
– The number of required rays can be significantly reduced with the use of state of the art denoising and resolution scaling algorithms. Normally a ray tracer needs to simulate many rays per pixel to get a good result, but with denoising one ray (or less) can be enough.
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