Powered by Volta Architecture GPUs with Highly Scalable Ray-Tracing Technology

Nvidia has announced NVIDIA RTX, a ray-tracing technology that enables content creators and game developers to perform real-time rendering at movie-quality levels.

NVIDIA RTX is the result of ten years of accumulated technological expertise in computer graphics algorithms and GPU architecture fields. It runs on NVIDIA Volta architecture GPUs and is comprised of highly scalable ray-tracing technology. To support ray-tracing through various interfaces, Nvidia has partnered with Microsoft and fully supports applications utilizing Microsoft's new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API with RTX.

Ray-tracing has long been recognized as a complete solution capable of implementing realistic lighting, reflections, and shadows, delivering a different level of realism that surpasses what was achievable with conventional rendering techniques. Real-time ray-tracing replicates the way light reacts in the real world through optical calculations, replacing most of the techniques currently used in standard rendering and implementing more photorealistic images.

Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President of Content and Technology at Nvidia, stated, "Real-time ray-tracing is something the graphics industry and game developers have been anticipating for decades, and NVIDIA RTX realizes that dream. GPUs are now becoming powerful enough to implement real-time ray-tracing applicable to gaming, and will usher in a new era of next-generation visuals."

Ray-tracing has been used for years in pre-rendering to implement game worlds in film-like manner. However, in the real-time interactive gaming sector, the demand for high frame rates and low latency has meant that to date, ray-tracing has been considered too computationally demanding for practical implementation. NVIDIA RTX is the technology that overcomes these limitations.

Max McMullen, Graphics and AI Development Manager at Microsoft, stated, "DirectX Raytracing represents the latest example of Microsoft's efforts to enable developers to create fantastic experiences by leveraging cutting-edge graphics innovation. Thanks to our close partnership with Nvidia regarding DirectX Raytracing and NVIDIA RTX technology, we can bring real-time ray-tracing even closer to the millions of gamers enjoying games on Windows."

Industry leaders including 4A Games, Epic Games, Remedy Entertainment, and Unity will showcase NVIDIA RTX at technical demonstrations at the Game Developers Conference being held in San Francisco this week. They are demonstrating how fantastic and vibrant graphics will be implemented in future games through real-time ray-tracing. Additionally, RTX supports Microsoft DirectX Raytracing, allowing Windows users anywhere to leverage cutting-edge DirectX Raytracing technology.

Kim Libreri, Chief Technology Officer at Epic Games, stated, "The arrival of NVIDIA RTX opens the possibility of actually implementing real-time ray-tracing. With support for the new DirectX Raytracing API, the game development community can now use powerful technology, and Nvidia is becoming the driving force leading next-generation gaming and film graphics."

Mikko Orrenmaa, Technology Team Manager at Remedy Entertainment, stated, "Integrating NVIDIA RTX into our Northlight engine was a relatively straightforward process. While developing using only NVIDIA RTX, we were able to prototype new lighting, reflection, and ambient occlusion techniques quite rapidly, and the visual quality was significantly improved compared to conventional rasterization techniques. We have great expectations for what can be implemented through NVIDIA RTX technology in the future, and we will deliver special experiences to gamers going forward."

Nvidia announced that it will add a ray-tracing denoising module to the NVIDIA GameWorks SDK to enable game developers to actively leverage the new technology. The NVIDIA GameWorks SDK, which provides a bundle of various tools and resources for developers, can shorten product cycles for games utilizing the new Microsoft DXR API and NVIDIA RTX, and further enhance realism.

The newly updated GameWorks SDK supports Volta and next-generation GPU architectures, and implements area shadow, glossy reflection, and ambient occlusion effects with ray-tracing applied.

Through these techniques, developers can produce high-quality reflection scenes that closely resemble reality, and achieve lighting and shadow effects with accurately applied physical phenomena. When these can be utilized on industry-standard platforms including Microsoft DXR, any PC game developer will be able to implement a new dimension of realism incomparable to previous methods.