The two major companies in the software and hardware industry, such as Microsoft and NVIDIA, join forces to implement the Real-Time Ray Tracing lighting system in DirectX 12 for Windows 10

Something had been leaked, but it is already official that Microsoft implements DirectX Raytracing technology, a new update for DirectX 12 and that it will only work with Windows 10. This improvement adds a Real-Time Ray Tracing lighting system, which will allow rendering the sources of light in real time, while rendering the behavior of light in the scene and objects. Compute Shaders are used for this technology, so we need great power for this optimization, which at the moment is only accessible to Volta graphics, which means that a lot of computing power is needed.

Microsoft and NVIDIA have collaborated with both companies, which has resulted in the NVIDIA RTX technology, which does the midpoint functions in the DirectX Raytracing API, but which has been optimized for the Volta architecture.

This technology has been considered long lasting, as a cornerstone for highlights, reflections and shadows. Ray-Tracing is already used in the real estate industry, for interactive photorealistic presentations of houses or buildings in development, but until now, it has not been used in games, because being much larger scenes, containing more objects and rapid camera movements, the necessary computing power would be enormous.

Within the cinema this technology is used within what are called 'light tracing farms', which are implemented in each frame. Movies have long used visual effects for ray tracing, because it is not interactive content and logically, it takes a lot of time and money to render at this level, something that only cinema can afford.

The amount of rays per pixel in terms of frames per second is a problem from a performance point of view, so DXR will implement fewer rays per pixel and tricks will be used to optimize image quality. RTX needs at least one Volta GPU at least, but it won't work on any other graphics card architecture, not even the Pascal architecture.

This is explained by the fact that Volta has the Tensor Core, which are cores used to accelerate ray tracing through a system that has been called 'noise elimination', which makes there are fewer rays per pixel and fills the spaces with AI. Tensor Core are used for image reconstruction, using neural networks, making real-time ray tracing possible.

Currently, the companies 4A Games, Epic Games and Unity, which have their own graphics engine, will show demonstrations next week during the NVIDIA GTC 2018, where we can see technical demonstrations of NVIDIA RTX. Frostbite and Allegorithmic will implement it in the future. Remedy Entertainment has already shown a demonstration of this technology.