NVIDIA’s flagship AI and deep learning focused GPU Technology Conference is coming next week, but that doesn’t mean the Santa Clara-based technology company didn’t have plenty of games and software-related announcements to make in the meantime. Let’s hit the rundown of news:
NVIDIA RTX: NVIDIA rolled out their new ray-tracing technology that aims to bring real-time cinematic-quality level rendering to game developers and other folks in the content creation business. A decade in the making, RTX ray-tracing tech runs on NVIDIA Volta-level GPUs.
Since RTX supports the DirectX Raytracing API, it will be compatible with the still-legion of Windows users. For developers using NVIDIA’s GameWorks SDK, they will soon benefit from a ray-tracing denoiser module.
What’s the advantage of raytracing? Raytracing is, according to Wikipedia:
“The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of visual realism, usually higher than that of typical scanline rendering methods, but at a greater computational cost. This makes ray tracing best suited for applications where the image can be rendered slowly ahead of time, such as in still images and film and television visual effects, and more poorly suited for real-time applications like video games where speed is critical.”
NVIDIA’s solution may have changed that last sentence, which was otherwise historically true for consumer content like games. To see an RTX demo in action, check out Remedy Entertainment’s GDC demo on YouTube:
Highlighting NVIDIA Highlights: NVIDIA released a public SDK of their tools that can help enable users to capture key moments, winning scores and in-game kills, and so on, so a gamer’s moments are saved for posterity. Or, to gloat for a little while friends and family. Social media sharing and animated GIF capture is part of the feature set too. It’s worth noting that highlights has a place with esports and live-streaming, which is a rapidly growing part of the gaming experience. To date, NVIDIA notes that gamers have recorded over half a billion videos using that feature.
NVIDIA Ansel Adds Online Art Gallery for Gamers: For the artists among the games, NVIDIA has added ShotwithGeForce.com. starting at GDC, gamers can check a digital art gallery of their own in-game photography, or check out those of their friends or those they’re fans of.
