Developers have been striving for years to make games photo realistic. Nvidia paved the way for that in 2018 when it took the world by storm with its first Ray Tracing capable GPUs.
While it did take quite some time for the developers to utilize the full potential of the GPUs, much development has been made since.
Nvidia is looking to burst ahead of its competitors AMD and Intel by promoting the new setting called “RT: Overdrive” in the Cyberpunk 2077 game, along with developers CD Projekt at the GDC session planned for March 22nd, mainly meant for developers.
Ray Tracing and Path Tracing are the two popular methods used in graphic technology to simulate the behavior of light in a virtual model/environment.
The key difference between ray tracing and path tracing is that path tracing takes into account the indirect lighting in a scene, which can produce more realistic lighting and shading effects but requires more computational power. Ray tracing, on the other hand, is faster but does not account for indirect lighting.
Path Tracing is commonly thus used in applications that require physically accurate simulations of light, such as architectural visualization and product design. Because of its heavy computational needs, it’s not a common feature in games yet.
And Nvidia will change just that with its groundbreaking RTX 40 series GPUs with much juice to offer. As demonstrated in the Portal RTX and Quake RTX, despite the low framerates, it’s a whole different level of gaming.
Cyberpunk 2077 is also set to get RTX Direct Illumination, multi-bounce RTX Indirect lighting and reflections, and full-resolution ray-traced reflections. Gaming is being pushed to a whole new level, thanks to the innovation by Nvidia. It’s no surprise they’re the market leaders in the GPU segment.
About Nvidia
NVIDIA Corporation is an American multinational technology company incorporated in Delaware, based in Santa Clara, California. They design graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system on chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market.
Best known for the “GeForce” lines of GPUs, they are a direct competitor to AMD’s “Radeon” series. NVIDIA has also expanded its offerings with its handheld game consoles Shield Portable, Shield Tablet, and Shield Android TV and its cloud gaming service GeForce Now.
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