NVIDIA showcases the power of Kepler - Real-time Raytracing Tech Demo

DSOGaming writes: "There is no doubt that real-time raytracing and global illumination are ‘the future’ of gaming graphics. And we are happy – and astounded – to report that Nvidia has showcased a real-time raytracing tech demo at this year’s GTC 2012. The result of that implementation is sweet as hell, so be sure to check the following video. Reflections and refractions are as accurate as they can get and this tech demo shows what we can expect from next-generation graphics."

[NYC_Gamer]

Nvidia is always pushing out the features/pushing technology forward....

[Machioto]

That wasn't impressive, Imagination technology bought out a company that did ray tracing and they can almost do a dynamic scene with their tech.

[ZoyosJD]

I'm sure that is true, but at what cost (time and money) in comparison? If you can't anwser those questions you are missing the point.

[Machioto]

They have dedicated hardware to do it and rewrote some parts to OpenGL to create openrl.

[ATi_Elite]

Both AMD and Nvidia are currently able to do Ray Tracing to some extent and have been able to do it since HD5000 and GTX400!

GTX600 and HD7000 are just more efficient!

Next Gen console games will look like BF3 PC while PC games will transition to CGI and Ray Tracing and look like the Transformers movies!!

[NYC_Gamer]

I can't wait to see how far Nvidia and AMD will push...

[F7U12]

Instant wood after reading that.

[john2]

Point is, will there be developers to actually offer us PC games with such graphics? Now that's the one million dollar question

[Oldman100]

Incredibru!

[GamingPerson]

I think in maybe 5 years we will get a raytracing feature in pc games. Maybe for puddles and stuff..

[Orpheus]

I bet Metro Last Light is using this damn good thing

[Leathersoup]

I would have rather seen the objects moving around. For all I know the reflections were reflection maps placed on each object.

[CryWolf]

Nvidia's tech is always going to pushed graphical technology beyond its limits, can't wait to see newer PC games using the Kepler Real-time Raytracing. And why haven't Microsoft jumped on the new Nvidia kepler graphic cards bandwagon yet AMD's ATI cards are being left in the graphical dust.

[TheModernKamikaze]

I bet some of you googled what Raytracing was, I did. :P

[LightofDarkness]

It's good that you did that, but I doubt many people had to do the same at this point. RT has been hailed as a "holy grail" graphical solution for many years now, as it would be a marked paradigm shift and a departure from traditional rasterization. However, I believe many game developers imagine that the approach would involve a hybrid of rasterization and RT in order to maintain comparable detail levels/performance and take some advantage of the benefits of real-time RT. Many seem to believe that employing a ray traced game engine would automatically bump us up to Avatar level CG, which is a fallacy.

It's become somewhat of a buzz-word that's been going around a long time, and it's one of the most oft-cited yet least understood technologies around. I strongly encourage you to read up about it so you can really appreciate what it is and what it would actually do.

Ideally, we'd move away from rasterizers altogether and employ another "messianic" technology called Sparse Voxel Octrees (which would replace polygonal geometry) along with RT to really make a HUGE jump in both general detail and scene/light rendering. However, the memory and processing requirements for both of these at once running in real-time is simply beyond our reach for the foreseeable future, but it's nice to have dreams :p