At this year’s GDC (Game Developer Conference), NVIDIA is focusing on two technologies Path Tracing and Frame Generation. The latter should be familiar to gamers in the RTX 40 series, but the former technology is still not commonly used in games. In an effort to change that, today NVIDIA released its first SDK (Software Development Kit) for Path Tracing, as part of their RTX kit.
Source: NVIDIA
Path Tracing is still a very complex and computationally expensive technology to use on modern consumer graphics. After all, Path Tracing is better known for creating realistic 3D images in architectural visualization or product design, but not in games. This is a more advanced form of ray tracing where the algorithm must calculate the number of light rays or their paths to create the full scene. The multiple paths are then averaged and the color and brightness of the pixels is calculated more accurately.
So far, Path Tracing has only been featured in graphical demos such as Quake RTX or Portal RTX, but has yet to find use in popular games. NVIDIA thought it was time to add Path Tracing to more games along with their most popular technologies, such as super resolution or frame generation, both of which can recover the lost performance for ray or path tracing.
Source: NVIDIA
Newly released software will enable game developers to take advantage of all of these technologies through NVIDIA’s RTX Path Tracing SDK. However, gamers shouldn’t expect Path Tracing to be used in all kinds of games just yet. NVIDIA lists at least two examples where Path Tracing might make sense, including a built-in photo mode, a very popular form of sharing in-game screenshots, or for game developers to verify if lighting is correct and ‘lifelike’.
Source: NVIDIA
NVIDIA Path Tracing SDK only works with GeForce GPUs. In fact, NVIDIA even says that the SDK “takes advantage of the power and feature set of the latest Ada series of GPUs”, meaning that it should work best with the RTX 40 series only (or RTX Ada workstations). What may also be important to note is that there are no plugins for Unity or Unreal Engine yet. Based on the official website, the SDK roadmap has now been set.
Source: Videocardz, NVIDIA.
Apart from the main news above, KOTAKGAME also has an interesting video that you can watch below.
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