This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of utilize.

Nvidia Ray Tracing

At SIGGRAPH this week, both AMD and Nvidia are announcing various hardware and software technologies. SIGGRAPH is an annual prove that focuses on computer graphics and advances in rendering techniques. At the show this twelvemonth, Nvidia showcased the means AI could be used to improve gaming or to create extremely realistic images, without the enormous computational horsepower that would exist required to brute forcefulness certain visual standards.

This final bit is of more than than incidental business organisation. The problem is simple: If y'all compare a top-shelf character animation from 2022 versus the best hardware of 2005, yous'll obviously notice the departure. At the same fourth dimension, nonetheless, y'all're unlikely to be fooled into thinking that even the near amazing CG is actually a motion-picture show. Slowing silicon advances make it less and less likely that nosotros'll ever be able to simply computationally strength the issue. Perhaps more than to the bespeak, even if we could, fauna-forcing a solution is rarely the all-time manner to solve it.

To be clear, this is an ongoing research project, non a bespeak that Nvidia volition be launching the new GTX 1100 AI Series in a few weeks. But some of the demos Nvidia has released are quite impressive in their own right, including a few that propose there might be a way to integrate ray tracing into gaming and real-time 3D rendering much more smoothly than what we've seen in the by.

A new blog mail from the company illustrates this bespeak. Aaron Lefohn reports on how Nvidia worked with Remedy entertainment to railroad train GPUs on how to produce facial animations straight from actor videos. He writes:

Instead of having to perform labor-intensive data conversion and touch-upward for hours of actor videos, NVIDIA'southward solution requires only v minutes of training information. The trained network automatically generates all facial animation needed for an entire game from a simple video stream. NVIDIA'south AI solution produces animation that is more consistent and retains the aforementioned fidelity as existing methods.

Only drawing animations isn't the merely thing Nvidia thinks AI tin do. 1 of the reasons why ray tracing has never been adopted as a primary method of drawing graphics in computer games is considering it's incredibly computationally expensive. Ray tracing refers to the practice of creating scenes past tracing the path of light as it leaves a (fake) light source and interacts with other objects nearby.

A realistic ray traced scene requires a very big number of rays. Performing the calculations to the degree required to brand ray tracing preferable to the technique used today, known as rasterization, has generally been beyond modern GPU hardware. That's not to say that ray tracing is never used, but it's typically deployed in express ways or using hybrid approaches that blend some aspects of ray tracing and rasterization together. The work Nvidia is showing at SIGGRAPH this week is an instance of how AI tin can accept a relatively rough image (the image on the left, top) and predict its terminal form much more quickly than actually performing plenty ray traces to generate that issue through brute force.

AI-Denoise

Using AI to de-noise an paradigm.

Ray tracing isn't the only field that could benefit from AI. As shown to a higher place, it's possible to employ AI to remove noise from an paradigm — something that could be incredibly useful in the time to come, for example, if watching lower-quality video or playing games at a low resolution due to panel limitations.

ai-antialiasing

AI tin patently as well be used for antialiasing purposes.

In fact, AI can also be used to perform antialiasing more accurately. If you follow the topic of AA at all, you're likely aware that every method of performing antialiasing — which translates to "smoothing out the jagged pixels that drive you basics" — has drawbacks. Supersampled antialiasing (SSAA) provides the all-time overall image quality, but sometimes renders an image blurry depending on the grid social club and imposes a huge performance penalty. Multisample antialiasing reduces the performance bear upon, but doesn't fully supersample the unabridged image. Other methods of simulating AA, like FXAA or SMAA, are much less computationally expensive merely also don't offer the same level of visual improvement. If Nvidia is right about using AI to generate AA, information technology could solve a trouble that's vexed GPU hardware designers and software engineers for decades.