Flexible and Powerful Ray Tracing with NVIDIA OptiX 8

In the realm of computer graphics, achieving photorealistic visuals has been a long-sought goal. NVIDIA OptiX is a powerful and flexible ray-tracing framework, enabling you to harness the potential of ray tracing. NVIDIA OptiX is a GPU-accelerated, ray-casting API based on the CUDA parallel programming model. It gives you all the tools required to implement … Continued

Top Nine Developer Questions About the Ray Tracing Essentials Series

During our recent webinar on ray tracing, available on-demand now, we received over 800 questions from developers who attended the session. Thanks to everyone who participated! After combing through the stack, NVIDIA researchers Eric Haines and Adam Marrs have selected the nine most compelling questions, and provided in-depth answers.

Introduction to Real-Time Ray Tracing with Vulkan

NVIDIA’s new Turing GPU unleashed real-time ray-tracing in a consumer GPU for the first time. Since then, much virtual ink has been spilled discussing ray tracing in DirectX 12. However, many developers want to embrace a more open approach using Vulkan, the low-level API supported by the Khronos Group. Vulkan enables developers to target many … Continued

Introducing Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine 4

Ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful and flexible lighting system. It’s powerful because of its accuracy and quality. Never have you had the ability to do things like shadows and reflections like this in real time. It’s flexible because you can mix raster and ray tracing rendering features together as you see … Continued

Bringing HLSL Ray Tracing to Vulkan

This post was revised March 2020 to reflect newly added support in DXC for targeting the SPV_KHR_ray_tracing multi-vendor extension. Vulkan logo DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR) allows you to render graphics using ray tracing instead of the traditional method of rasterization. This API was created by NVIDIA and Microsoft back in 2018. A few months later, … Continued

Call for Papers: Real-Time Ray Tracing

Real-time ray tracing – the holy grail of graphics, considered unattainable for decades – is now possible for video games. Thanks to advances in GPU hardware and integration in standards like DirectX, game developers will eagerly add ray tracing to take the next step in visual quality and ease of content creation. To help game … Continued

Creating Optimal Meshes for Ray Tracing

When you are creating triangle meshes for ray tracing or reusing meshes that have been successfully used in rasterization-based rendering, there are some pitfalls that can cause surprising performance issues. Some mesh properties that have been acceptable in rasterization can be problematic in ray tracing or require specific handling to work as expected. This post … Continued

Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine 4: Top 10 Developer Questions

We recently hosted Ray Tracing in Unreal Engine 4, a webinar now available on-demand that guides developers on best practices for producing real-time ray-traced reflections, global illumination, shadows, and more. We hosted a Q&A session, and received an overflow of excellent questions from the audience. This posts includes the top 10.

Ignacio Llamas Interview: Unearthing Ray Tracing

We spoke with Ignacio Llamas, Director of Real Time Ray Tracing Software at NVIDIA about the introduction of real-time ray tracing in consumer GPUs. How did you get started on ray tracing at NVIDIA? I joined NVIDIA about four years ago, on the GPU architecture team. If somebody told you that you’d be shipping consumer … Continued

Parallel Shader Compilation for Ray Tracing Pipeline States

In ray tracing, a single pipeline state object (PSO) can contain any number of shaders. This number can grow large, depending on scene content and ray types handled with the PSO; construction cost of the state object can significantly increase. The DXR API makes it possible to distribute part of the creation work to multiple … Continued