As promised, NVIDIA today announced its collaboration with Microsoft for a brand new DirectX API that will allow real-time ray tracing. According to the teams, the DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API will enable straightforward access to real-time ray tracing running on development graphics hardware, and below you can find its first screenshot from Remedy’s Northlight Engine.
Game developers that use this DXR API will be able to produce real-time ray tracing into their game engines and create a seamless hybrid between the rasterized and the ray traced image. Ray tracing can be used to add quality and accuracy to rendering techniques that are difficult to achieve with traditional rasterization techniques.
As noted, some of the improvements include accurate soft shadows, ambient occlusion, reflections and global illumination.
Remedy, one of the few developers that have access to this API has shared the following screenshot, showing this new DXR API in full effect. Epic Games has also shared a screenshot from Unreal Engine 4 using the DXR API.
Mikko Orrenmaa, the Technology Team Manager of Remedy Entertainment, said:
“Integrating NVIDIA RTX technology into our Northlight engine was a relatively straightforward exercise. Developing exclusively on NVIDIA GPUs, we were surprised just how quickly we were able to prototype new lighting, reflection, and ambient occlusion techniques, with significantly better visual fidelity than traditional rasterization techniques. We are really excited about what we can achieve in the future with NVIDIA® RTX. Gamers are in for something special.”
Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA, added:
“Remedy has accomplished something very exciting in a short amount of time using NVIDIA RTX on Microsoft’s DXR. The combination of today’s powerful GPUs, industry standard API support and game engine integration finally puts real-time ray tracing within reach for the graphics industry and game developers.”
Among the game engines that currently support the DXR API are Unreal Engine 4, Unity, Frostbite and Northlight.
Last but not least, the teams claimed that this technology remains at research level, and as such it is far from being implemented into a video game!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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