The Future of Graphics

Recently, Nvidia announced and shipped their new graphics cards called RTX 20XX. These new cards offer an important new piece of technology for gaming and graphics by using "Real Time Ray-Tracing" and artificial intelligence to improve scenes.

What is Ray Tracing?

Ray Tracing is an alternative method to rendering graphics to your monitor. The current method of generating graphics to the screen is called rasterization. This works by taking an object and directly converting it in to pixels on your monitor. While this is fine for games because it is fast, using this technique can make for unrealistic-looking scenes. We can see this in blender if we use blender render engine.

Ray tracing is the simulation of photons of light traveling from a light source to the player but reversed (in blender this is called the "cycles" engine). As This simulates hundreds of photons the slower this is. In the new Nvidia graphics cards there are newly designed cores that specifically tackle ray tracing. Unfortunately to make it real-time they had to reduce the amount of photons that are simulated and they don't lose quality by doing this because the cards has AI which aids ray tracing by estimating what it would look like if it were high quality.

Another feature of these cards is the ability to render at very high resolutions 4k+ without any impact of frame rates using the AI to estimate what it would look like.

This is some interesting technologies that I would like to further be developed. Using ray tracing with virtual reality and being able to render at 4k+ with no or little impact on FPS really could change the gaming industry.

FISHER, J. (2018). GeForce RTX Propels PC Gaming’s Golden Age with Real-Time Ray Tracing NVIDIA Blog. [online] The Official NVIDIA Blog. Available at: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/20/geforce-rtx-real-time-ray-tracing/ [Accessed 4 Oct. 2018]