Global illumination with path tracing in OptiX

This is no doubt the future of game graphics. Path tracing is a brute force ray tracing method that delivers global illumination of the highest possible quality and is used as a gold standard to test less accurate GI algorithms. Path tracing used to be the slowest method of calculating GI, but GPUs excel at this brute force method thanks to their massive parallellism. Fermi will be very good at this because of its L1 and L2 cache. The path tracer is running on OptiX on several GT200 based GPUs. In last part of the video, the pathtracer is slower, because it is running on fewer GPUs. No audio.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• optix
• path tracing
• ray tracing
• nvidia
• fermi
• GF100

[NutsandGuts]

But what about dynamic objects? does it have to reconstruct the acceleration structure(kd tree, etc)?

[SuperGastrocnemius]

@NutsandGuts each dynamic object uses a separate BVH in OptiX, soon it will use HLBVH. It's very fast and allows for thousands of dynamic objects to be updated/rebuilt simultaneously at high framerates. So expect dynamic raytraced or pathtraced demos soon.

[Phygar1]

I've been dreaming of the day where we can play games using path tracing for a while! I'm sure it will be possible very soon, at least on very high-end systems. If that day ever comes it will be strange, because instead of people with bad computers just having bad framerates, they will be able to have a tradeoff between framerates and noisy pictures.

[SuperGastrocnemius]

@Phygar1 Me too! I also believe it will be possible "soon", like in 1-2 years, at low res and with some noise but not too obtrusive. Just look at the Brigade engine developed by Jacco Bikker: youtube"dot"com/watch?v=Jm6hz2­-gxZ0 Very exciting stuff, that could start a little revolution for game rendering.

[malkdk]

@bernverdnardo1 wanna bet?

[bernverdnardo1]

"This is no doubt the future of game graphics"

...and it always will be.

[deifo]

Why not render to an offscreen buffer and write to screen a blurred version of that offscreen buffer? That would eliminate the black pixels.

Yes, you'll get a blurry picture until the colors converge, but that would be subjectively better IMO.

[MrKarlalfred88]

@nazurea you are right. probably not. :) that game is too complex for that. :) but it will still come to other games. I believe so.

[nazurea]

@MrKarlalfred88 no.

[MrKarlalfred88]

@Phygar1 Me too. I can't wait until the Bohemia Interactive include this in their war sims. =) Will it come to Arma 3 maybe? =]