Acceleration structures spatially organize geometry to accelerate ray tracing traversal performance. When you create an acceleration structure, a conservative memory size is allocated. This process is called compacting the acceleration structure and it is important for reducing the memory overhead of acceleration structures. Another key ingredient to reducing memory is suballocating��
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In ray tracing, more geometries can reside in the GPU memory than with the rasterization approach because rays may hit the geometries out of the view frustum. You can let the GPU compact acceleration structures to save memory usage. For some games, compaction reduces the memory footprint for a bottom-level acceleration structure (BLAS) by at least 50%. BLASes usually take more GPU memory than top��
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In Microsoft Direct3D, anything that uses memory is considered a resource: textures, vertex buffers, index buffers, render targets, constant buffers, structured buffers, and so on. It��s natural to think that each individual object, such as a texture, is always one resource. In this post, I discuss DXR��s Bottom Level Acceleration Structures (BLASes) and best practices with regard to managing them.
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This post has been updated: Best Practices for Using NVIDIA RTX Ray Tracing (Updated). This post gathers best practices based on our experiences so far on using NVIDIA RTX ray tracing in games. I��ve organized the tips into short, actionable items that give practical tips for developers working on ray tracing today. They aim to give a broad picture of what kind of solutions lead to good��
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Optimizing real-time graphics applications for maximum performance can be a challenging endeavor, and ray tracing is no exception. Whether you want to make your graphics engine more efficient overall or find a specific performance bottleneck, profiling is the most important tool to achieve your goals. Despite constantly improving support for ray tracing APIs in profilers such as Nsight Graphics��
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Many GPU performance analysis tools are based on a capture and replay mechanism, where a frame is first captured (either in-memory or to disk), and then replayed multiple times to be profiled. Nsight Graphics: GPU Trace differs in that it directly profiles the frames emitted by a live application, with no constraint on subsequent frames to be identical. This approach makes the tool simpler than��
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Epic Games is adding ��Early Access�� support for ray tracing through the DirectX Raytracing API (DXR) to Unreal Engine with the pending release of Unreal Engine 4.22. Demos dating back to GDC 2018 show impressive ray tracing results using DXR. However, UE 4.22 integrates ray tracing support into the mainline branch, making ray tracing available to the wider world. While 4.22 is an early release��
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This post presents best practices for implementing ray tracing in games and other real-time graphics applications. We present these as briefly as possible to help you quickly find key ideas. This is based on a presentation made at the 2019 GDC by NVIDIA engineers. 1.1 General Practices Move AS management (build/update) to an async compute queue. Using an async compute queue pairs��
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In ray tracing, a single pipeline state object (PSO) can contain any number of shaders. This number can grow large, depending on scene content and ray types handled with the PSO; construction cost of the state object can significantly increase. The DXR API makes it possible to distribute part of the creation work to multiple threads by utilizing collections. A collection is a with type .
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RTX is NVIDIA��s new platform for hybrid rendering, allowing the combination of rasterization and compute-based techniques with hardware-accelerated ray tracing and deep learning. It has already been adopted in a number of games and engines. Based on those experiences, this blog aims to give the reader an insight into how RTX ray tracing is best integrated into real-time applications today.
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RTX introduces an exciting and fundamental shift in the way lighting systems work in games and applications. In this video series, NVIDIA Engineers Martin-Karl Lefrancois and Pascal Gautron help you get started with real-time ray tracing. You��ll learn how data and rendering is managed, how acceleration structures and shaders work, and what new components are needed for your pipeline.
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Editor��s note: What happens when a veteran graphics programmer with substantial experience in old-school ray tracing (in other words, offline rendering), gets hold of hardware capable of real-time ray tracing? I��m finally convinced. I joined NVIDIA around SIGGRAPH, just as the RTX hardware for ray tracing was announced. I saw the demos, heard the stats, but these didn��t mean a lot to me��
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Real-time ray tracing is upon us. Electronic Arts leads the charge in integrating the technology on an engine level. This video series features Sebastien Hillaire, Senior Rendering Engineer at EA/Frostbite. Sebastian discusses real-time raytracing and global illumination (GI) workflows in Frostbite. He explains the context and the current workflows Frostbite uses, then describes the process of��
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After decades of research, NVIDIA has unearthed the holy grail of video game graphics: real-time ray tracing! This series of videos will explain why you need to add ray tracing to your pipeline now. The idea isn��t to use ray tracing as the only rendering technique, but to combine it with traditional rasterization to generate the best possible blend of performance and image quality.
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Ray tracing will soon revolutionize the way video games look. Ray tracing simulates how rays of light hit and bounce off of objects, enabling developers to create stunning imagery that lives up to the word ��photorealistic��. Ignacio Llamas and Edward Liu from NVIDIA��s real-time rendering software team will introduce you to real-time ray tracing in this series of seven short videos.
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Conventional 3D rendering has typically used a process called rasterization since the 1990s. Rasterization uses objects created from a mesh of triangles or polygons to represent a 3D model of an object. The rendering pipeline then converts each triangle of the 3D models into pixels on a 2D image plane. These pixels may then be further processed or ��shaded�� before final display on the screen.
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��Ray tracing is the future, and it always will be!�� has been the tongue-in-cheek phrase used by graphics developers for decades when asked whether real-time ray tracing will ever be feasible. Everyone seems to agree on the first part: ray tracing is the future. That��s because ray tracing is the only technology we know of that enables the rendering of truly photorealistic images.
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