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Fresh out of GDC 2018 come a few more tech demos showing off real time ray tracing technologies. These come just a day after Microsoft announced DirectX Raytracing along with support promised from Nvidia and AMD.First up is a tech demo from Epic Games. It's Star Wars themed and looks stunning, as you would expect. There is a catch, but we'll get to that after the video.
During today’s “State of Unreal” opening session at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the three companies presented an experimental cinematic demo using Star Wars characters from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi built with Unreal Engine 4. The demonstration is powered by NVIDIA’s RTX technology for Volta GPUs, available via Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing API (DXR).
Next-generation rendering features shown in today’s demo include:
• Textured area lights
• Ray-traced area light shadows
• Ray-traced reflections
• Ray-traced ambient occlusion
• Cinematic depth of field (DOF)
• NVIDIA GameWorks ray tracing denoising
Next-generation rendering features shown in today’s demo include:
• Textured area lights
• Ray-traced area light shadows
• Ray-traced reflections
• Ray-traced ambient occlusion
• Cinematic depth of field (DOF)
• NVIDIA GameWorks ray tracing denoising
Looks great, right? You bet it does! The problem here is that this was accomplished with not one, not two, and not even three top of the line cards. This was accomplished with four Nvidia Tesla V100 cards. I'm talking about the ~$10,000 (USD; each) workstation cards, not your pitiful $3,000 Titan V cards, and sure as hell not your ~$800 GTX 1080 Ti cards. So yeah, it seems as though everyone was being incredibly generous yesterday when they announced real time ray tracing technologies.
Moving on now to Futuremark and their real time demo. Futuremark states that they showed off the following demo at GDC 2018 this week. They also reveal that they will be using DirectX Raytracing in a new 3DMark benchmark test, which should be out later this year. There was no word (that I've seen) as to what hardware this demo was being run on.
Practical real-time raytracing for games
Raytracing is not a new technique, but until recently it has been too computationally demanding to use in real-time games.
With modern GPUs, it's now possible to use rasterization for most of the rendering and a smaller amount of raytracing to enhance shadows, reflections, and other effects that are difficult to achieve with traditional techniques.
Our DXR tech demo runs in real-time on current GPU hardware and, because it builds on existing methods, it was relatively easy to implement into our DirectX 12 game engine.
We are proud to be one of the first developers chosen to work with DirectX Raytracing, and we are excited about the opportunities for this new API.
Raytracing is not a new technique, but until recently it has been too computationally demanding to use in real-time games.
With modern GPUs, it's now possible to use rasterization for most of the rendering and a smaller amount of raytracing to enhance shadows, reflections, and other effects that are difficult to achieve with traditional techniques.
Our DXR tech demo runs in real-time on current GPU hardware and, because it builds on existing methods, it was relatively easy to implement into our DirectX 12 game engine.
We are proud to be one of the first developers chosen to work with DirectX Raytracing, and we are excited about the opportunities for this new API.
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