The concept path tracing You’re going to be hearing this a lot in connection with NVIDIA in the coming weeks, especially once the game developer conference, GDC, takes place at its annual event. The evil tongues speak of that will show the technology for the first time with Cyberpunk. However, it will not be the only game with which we see it.
In recent years, we have seen versions of classics from the 90s rendered using the Path Tracing technique, such as Quake 2 RTX. However, NVIDIA’s idea is to use a hybrid version of it that gives it even more advantage over its rival that can be applied in games.
Why NVIDIA bets on Path Tracing?
We have to assume that Path Tracing is a variant of ray tracing, so it is not a complete abandonment of the idea, but rather an attempt to tie PC games to their technologies. Especially to artificial intelligence, which is where the company’s graphics cards have evolved in the last five years, as well as the rest of its efforts. But it is that they also have an additional motivation to make this bet and it is the fact that AMD, its rival in the market, has not given it importance.
But what is Path Tracing?
If we are purists, Path Tracing is an advanced version of Ray Tracing that allows scenes to be generated with a greater amount of detail. We must start from the fact that as ray tracing we can refer to several different techniques as now:
- Ray tracing in its original definition, the so-called Whitted Ray Tracing; however, it is not entirely accurate when it comes to certain advanced lighting effects.
- Hybrid rendering where Ray Tracing algorithms are used for dynamic indirect lighting in games. That is, everything is rendered in the traditional way, without ray tracing, except for certain specific points in the scene.
- Advanced ray tracing algorithms such as Path Tracing, Photon Mapping or Montecarlo. However, of all of them, the one with all the numbers to be used in games is the first.
However, Path Tracing has the problem that it requires each pixel in the scene to be calculated not tens, but hundreds of times in order to obtain a sufficiently clear image, with little noise and no graininess. This requires a lot of computing power to generate each image and it wasn’t good enough for video games, at least until now.
Why is NVIDIA betting on the future?
One way to speed up Path Tracing is with what we call Denoising, which consists of using AI and therefore Tensor cores in order to reduce the number of samples considerably and requiring much less powerful hardware. . The fact is that we already saw this in NVIDIA Optix, but the evolution in power of graphics cards allows it to be applied in real time. Something that we already anticipated almost two years ago.
So NVIDIA’s motivation is clear in this case, firstly it is a space that the competition cannot go to, secondly it is a way for users to justify the purchase of their RTX 40 above of previous generation models. In any case, we will have to see how developers adopt this technology in games. The only way they could do it en masse would be if they got the advantages of ray tracing, but at a much higher frame rate per second.
And no, it’s not something they invented, without going any further, Pixar has been using it in their movies for a long time. Of course, do not expect the visual quality of them in your games. This is about getting more FPS in games with a ray tracing variant.
