I see companies like NVidia constantly releasing changes that immediate impact gaming visuals (ex full ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077). How do these take affect without the graphic engine changes. And vice versa, how do graphic engines constantly improve on existing hardware?
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Hardware changes need the graphics engine to be modified, especially with something as different as ray tracing. There will have been a lot of communication between Nvidia and the engine developers to ensure that everything is hooked up correctly and functioning as expected.
When going the other way (graphics engines improving without new hardware), this is because graphics hardware is programmable (if you’ve ever heard of a shader, this just means a program running directly on the GPU). This means that new effects can be designed that run quickly on the hardware, without needing hardware to be changed to specifically support the effect. The downside is that lots of fancy effects require the GPU to do more work, so performance reduces.
Raytracing is a very tricky problem, and can’t really be implemented quickly just with shaders, it needs a large amount of special hardware.
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