Real-Time Ray Tracing
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that can produce incredibly realistic lighting effects. Essentially, an algorithm can trace the path of light and then simulate the way that the light interacts with the virtual objects it ultimately hits in the computer-generated world. It's a much more advanced and lifelike way of rendering light and shadows in a scene.
The Ray Tracing features are composed of a series of ray tracing shaders and ray-tracing effects. With each of these, we're able to achieve natural realistic looking lighting effects in real-time which are comparable to modern offline renderers for shadowing, ambient occlusion, reflections, and more.
Ray tracing technology brings real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to the content visual effects and provides realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections by simulating the physical behavior of light. The rendering analyses where the light hits and calculates the interaction and interplay much like the human eye would process real light, shadows, and reflections.
Reality Engine takes advantage of the latest powerful technologies from the world’s most leading companies like Nvidia RTX GPU technology to produce high-quality and realistic rendering possible in the industry today. It is mandatory to follow the below-mentioned criteria to work with Ray tracing:
| Microsoft Windows OS version | Windows 10 RS5 (Build 1809) or later. |
| GPU | NVIDIA RTX 6000 with DXR support.To know more about certified GPU, click here. |
| DirectX version | Reality Editor must be running in DX12 mode.To know how to run Reality Editor in DX12 mode, click here. |
| Enable Ray Tracing in Reality Editor | Ray tracing option must be enabled in Reality Editor.To know how to enable Ray tracing option in Reality Editor, click here. |
| Studio Launch settings | In Reality Control application, while creating a studio for the projects, in Launch settings "Check" the DX12 option. |
DXR, The Next Generation of Graphics API
DirectX Ray tracing (DXR) technology significantly focuses on ray tracing. DirectX 12 is the newest version of Microsoft’s DirectX application programming interface, which handles visual and other multimedia tasks on Windows-based systems with drastically higher frame rates and improved performance.
DXR technology compliments with current GPU technology and Reality Engine takes advantage of latest powerful technologies from world’s most leading companies like Nvidia RTX GPU technology to produce high quality and realistic rendering possible in the industry today.
You should run in DX12 mode to run DXR API. To learn how to start Reality Editor in DX12 mode, click here.
GPU Direct API is Now Compatible with DX12
GPU Direct is important for video output without performance hit. This becomes extremely important when using DXR API (DX12 is the pre-requisite for DXR) to render scenes with real-time ray tracing.
Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 is Certified GPU for Ray Tracing
With the introduction of Ray tracing rendering, new technology GPUs are also equally important to support Ray trace.
The NVIDIA RTX platform fuses ray tracing, deep learning and rasterization to fundamentally transform the creative process for content creators. Applications built on the RTX platform bring the power of real-time photorealistic rendering and AI-enhanced graphics, video and image processing, to enable millions of designers and artists to create amazing content in a completely new way.
Ray tracing, which has long been used for non-real-time rendering, now works in real-time and provides realistic lighting by simulating the physical behavior of light. Ray tracing calculates the color of pixels by tracing the path that light would take if it were to travel from the eye of the viewer through the virtual 3D scene.
As it traverses the scene, the light may reflect from one object to another (causing reflections), be blocked by objects (causing shadows), or pass through transparent or semi-transparent objects (causing refractions). All of these interactions are combined to produce the final color of a pixel that then displayed on the screen.
RTX 6000 GPU includes dedicated ray tracing acceleration hardware, uses an advanced acceleration structure, and implements an entirely new GPU rendering pipeline to enable real-time ray tracing in graphics applications. For more information about Raytrace on RTX boards, click the link below: