NVIDIA GeForce
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2018–2020
1:46 · 497K views · Mar 19, 2018
A two-minute NVIDIA RTX tech demo built on Remedy's Northlight engine, showing real-time ray-traced lighting and shadows in a game scene. It was shown alongside the launch of RTX and DirectX Raytracing.
Mentioned as an early example of real-time ray tracing and path tracing demos.
3 comments from Hacker News
The link I shared wasn't UE5, and their other videos specifically indicate that they are running on PC - unbelievably modest PC hardware at that. > it's not a trivial thing to get a demo like this running well on PCs This old tired argument. The current theory for how the meshing is done is something similar to mesh shaders (available on commodity PC hardware since 2018)[1]. This "PS5 platform specific feature" running on PC in 2018[2]. As for the lighting, NVDIA have already had this "platform specific feature" on PCs for some time now. It's called RTX. In 2018[3] (using DLSS), in 2020[4] (no apparent DLSS usage, but it may have improved). Both next-gen consoles are essentially PCs. Their primary advantage is tightly coupled hardware (e.g. memory latency, the absurdly fast PS5 SSD). While dedicated raytracing silicon on AMD is currently unique to PS5 (AMD claims they can emulate DXRT on Navi), it has been around for more than a year in consumer hands in the form RTX. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [LINK] [3]: this video [4]: [LINK]
Two points: - What you said is true of any rendering method you use. If you have a complex scene, it'll take more time to render one frame. - What I said about 2018 or 2019 is what nVidia's promotion is all about. See the demos linked at the bottom of my comment. They keep calling it 'real-time ray tracing' but it's really 'real-time path tracing'. And it's already happening. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video
Actually, raytracing is a domain with strong potential for AI, as there is a lot of work using ML models to de-noise ray-traced scenes in real time. Edit: Yeah, NVidia actually just announced a big project on that exact subject: this video