Ray tracing in real time has long been the ‘holy grail’ of graphics engineers. Up to now, that has not been possible, although as we have reported, companies have worked on ray-tracing just the parts of an image that may produce the most realism for the smallest processing budget. It’s the processor power needed that has been the major barrier. Up to now, even with dedicated multi-machine ‘render farms’, images have often taken hours to create.
Now Nvidia has announced RTX, technology for accelerating ray traced graphics on GPUs using the firm’s Volta architecture. At the same time and event (the Game Developers’ Conference – GDC), Microsoft announced an API for ray tracing in DirectX and called DXR. RTX is, of course, compatible with DXR, which will also support older cards. (and Microsoft has put a primer on ray tracing on its DirectX blog). It also has an analysis tool, PIX.
Microsoft has support for the new API from Electronic Arts with Frostbite, Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, Futuremark with the 3DMark and the Unity engine, among others. More will follow. Microsoft does not expect and immediate switch to the technology, but a gradual increase in the usage over the next few years.
Now, the Volta is a processor architecture with a lot of power and the first GPU based on it, the V100, was announced last year and intended as a GPU for data centres. It has 21 billion transistors and is said to have the power of 100 CPUs in deep learning applications (more than 100 Teraflops) and has an array of 5,000 GPU shaders along with 640 cores.
(Note that one of the demos shown by Epiq Games at the GDC used an Nvidia DGX Station which has four V100 GPUs and costs $50,000, so not everyone will have access immediately!)
Analyst Comment
Specialists, including our graphics guru friend, Dr. Jon Peddie, are expecting to find out more details on this development at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference shortly. Check out the video below for an idea of what Epic Games is doing with the technology. (BR)
