ray tracing Is this real Ray Tracing

[Silverwho]

Hello, came across this today on world of tanks website, https://youtu.be/dXbjmF--QVc and was wondering if this is actually RayTracing and if so why did Nvidia release RTX cards for RT?

[Jurrunio]

this is raytracing from what they tell

 

4 minutes ago, Silverwho said:

if so why did Nvidia release RTX cards for RT?

no one said you must use RTX cards for RT, they're just much faster. Movie industry even use RT with CPUs, though it takes a very long time for each frame

[RejZoR]

5 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

this is raytracing from what they tell

 

no one said you must use RTX cards for RT, they're just much faster. Movie industry even use RT with CPUs, though it takes a very long time for each frame

I'm pretty sure movie industry doesn't use CPU's. Stacks of GPU racks however, they do.

[Electronics Wizardy]

7 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I'm pretty sure movie industry doesn't use CPU's. Stacks of GPU racks however, they do.

I think pixar with renderman has been cpu only for a while, mostly cause gpus don't have much ram you can use(>1tb vs about 48gb max on gpus)

[Jurrunio]

8 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I'm pretty sure movie industry doesn't use CPU's. Stacks of GPU racks however, they do.

Both actually, but CPUs are more accurate + can use a shit ton of memory, so more often used in the final render.

[Silverwho]

18 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

this is raytracing from what they tell

 

no one said you must use RTX cards for RT, they're just much faster. Movie industry even use RT with CPUs, though it takes a very long time for each frame

Ok thanks for that, I did run there test, and with RT on it did drop my score by like 9,000 points.

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 hour ago, Silverwho said:

Hello, came across this today on world of tanks website, https://youtu.be/dXbjmF--QVc and was wondering if this is actually RayTracing and if so why did Nvidia release RTX cards for RT?

It is ray tracing. The algorithm they describe is the same one NVIDIA describes (from https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gtx-dxr-ray-tracing-available-now/ )

 

Ray tracing is simulating how light would actually behave, i.e., 'tracing' the path a photon would take and accumulating the results. The developers of World of Tanks are using ray tracing to generate shadows in this case, rather than reflections that are the most visible use case of ray tracing.

[ManyCoresGuy]

1 hour ago, RejZoR said:

I'm pretty sure movie industry doesn't use CPU's. Stacks of GPU racks however, they do.

I have first hand knowledge and experience with this and you sir are correct!

[Mira Yurizaki]

I missed a point in OP's question:

 

1 hour ago, Silverwho said:

if so why did Nvidia release RTX cards for RT?

It's a misconception that you need specialized ray tracing hardware to do any ray tacing. Ray tracing has been around for decades, and even attempts to do it on graphics cards isn't anything new:

(this was a tech demo for the GeForce GTX 480, back in 2010)

 

However, ray tracing is an expensive process as if you want good quality, you're going to need to simulate a lot of rays to do so. What specialized ray tracing hardware does is it accelerates the process allowing for many more rays per second to be simulated. NVIDIA's been in the ray tracing market for years and the whole point of releasing a GPU with specialized ray tracing hardware is to push the envelope further. Plus, good quality images generated from ray tracing suitable for real-time applications for years was considered the holy grail of graphics rendering.