THE GRAPHICAL UNION ADDRESS: NOW WITH MORE RAY TRACING
Over two years ago, Nvidia surprised nearly everyone by announcing that its next-gen Turing architecture would feature the holy grail of computer graphics: Ray tracing (RT). It’s a technique that’s been around for decades, and the movie industry makes extensive use of it these days – or at least it did, back when movies were still being made, and we could go out to watch them. The thought of getting hyper-realistic visuals in games that could rival the latest blockbusters sounded too good to be true, and it was. Today, we have Nvidia’s second generation of RT hardware in the Ampere architecture, and AMD has joined the fray with its RDNA2 GPUs. It’s time for a State of the Union address on the subject of ray tracing in games...
A brief overview of RT Effects
We’re not going to dig deep into the details of how RT works – that’s familiar territory by now. The short summary is that it involves calculating the projection of lines (rays) into the geometry of a scene to figure out what polygon the ray intersects, and then depending on the material properties of that polygon, additional rays can be cast. Ultimately, the results of all those individual rays are then combined to determine the final colour value for a pixel.
While it might seem like a single ray per pixel would suffice, it doesn’t really get the job done. Each bounce counts as a new ray, and there are different types of material and ray calculations that need to be done. The main takeaway is that fully ray-traced scenes in movies can use hundreds or even thousands of rays per pixel, and take hours of rendering time per frame. That’s many orders of magnitude slower than what we want from PC games. Even a relatively “fast” rendering time of 10 minutes per frame in a movie is still about two million times slower than a PC game running at 60 frames per second.
The trick for real-time ray tracing is to find a compromise between quality and performance. GPUs containing RT hardware
