NVIDIA says this is the biggest graphics evolution in years

Nvidia has come up with a look at Path Tracing technology and the results look impressive.
The videos and slides that appeared on Twitter are excerpts from Petrik Clarberg’s presentation at the GTC (GPU Technology Conference).

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1 Path tracing technology in games was considered impossible for a long time

2 Path Tracing is the future for new generations of games.

2.1 Related posts:

On the official website, Nvidia calls Path Tracing technology “the most accurate way to render” and one of the “biggest advances in real-time graphics in many years.” Until now, when we talk about real-time graphics, the most advanced technology in PC and console games would be Ray Tracing, but Nvidia would be looking to evolve the feature with Path Tracing.

(3/10) This is real-time path tracing research.
30-bounce path tracing in a scene with ~3B instanced triangles. pic.twitter.com/bs9MxHnwUS
— Aaron Lefohn (@aaronlefohn) March 29, 2022

Path Tracing is a deeper implementation of RayTracing, abandoning 3D rasterization altogether and works with images that have billions of light tracking calculations. Essentially, the algorithm acts on all the illumination that reaches a single point on the surface of an object. It is then reduced by a surface reflectance function (BRDF) to determine what the camera sees, i.e. how much the person sees after bouncing light off a variable number of surfaces. This procedure is repeated for each pixel of the image. And, when combined with physically accurate surface models, a simulation of real light sources, and optically correct cameras, it can produce still images that are virtually identical to photographs.

(2/10) Watch the recording of Petrik’s real-time path tracing research talk at the GTC site.
Registration required, but it’s free: https://t.co/kcAlvGYyAd
— Aaron Lefohn (@aaronlefohn) March 29, 2022

Path tracing technology in games was considered impossible for a long time

With this technique in mind, game developers can rasterize the primary light rays and then trace the lighting path to the scene based on the path trace. In an official post, Nvidia itself says that the idea of using Path tracing in games was considered impossible for a long time, but the advancement of current video cards and their technologies already allows us to dream of path tracing in real time. Of course, we still have limits, since the use of this technology depends on simple modeling, without too many triangles, to have the space to perform all the necessary trillions of calculations.