Nvidia has developed a new one tracking an algorithm that makes it easy for developers to apply advanced lighting techniques to their games, TechPowerUp reported on this. This reduces visual glitches, makes it look better, and makes it unnecessary to use some of the emulation techniques currently required for track tracking.
Who is betting on a new Cyberpunk update coming down the pipe?
Nvidia has been at the forefront of real-time ray-traced lighting effects for nearly a decade. It helped kick-start things for modern gaming with the release of the RTX 2000 series in 2018, thanks to their on-board RT accelerator cores, and it’s only gotten stronger since then. Path tracking, more realistic form ray tracingit’s been used by some games since then, but its high requirements mean it’s still underused. This may change after Nvidia’s latest update.
With the release of Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination in 2019 and Reservoir-based Spatio-temporal Importance Resampling in 2020, tracking has become more feasible for developers. They’ve reduced the hardware requirements for running such lighting effects, and Nvidia’s new Reservoir-based ReSTIR PT Enhanced algorithm makes several major leaps in performance and quality in equal measure.
The new algorithm is said to make path-tracked lighting up to 3x faster, while reducing visual and numerical errors and requiring less noise. This could be big news for developers of existing games with track tracking, as future updates could make it much easier to get it to work. However, the impact on future hardware could be more dramatic. Next-gen consoles could benefit from pursuing cheaper workarounds, especially when available combined with raising and creating a framework to further improve performance.
“We halve spatial reuse costs with reciprocal neighbor selection, enhance displacement maps with new footprint-based reconnection criteria, and reduce spatiotemporal correlation with remaps,” Summary of Nvidia from the claims of the research paper.
Recommended by our editors
If Nvidia’s performance claims are valid, it could open up mid-range and older graphics cards to run more advanced ray-tracing lighting, finally democratizing one of the best visuals in modern games.
When Nvidia shows off the new algorithm in a tech demo at the ACM Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Technologies in May, specific details on how it achieved this will be revealed. However, Nvidia notes that the technology is still in development and any real-world gaming samples won’t be ready for quite some time.
Get our best stories!
Your Daily Dose of Our Best Tech News
By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm that you are 16+ and agree with us Terms of use and Privacy Policy.
Thank you for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Watch your inbox!
About our specialist
John Martindale
Contributor
Experience
Jon Martindale is a tech journalist from the UK with 20 years of experience covering all types of PC components and related gadgets. He has written for a number of publications, including ExtremeTech, Digital Trends, Forbes, US News & World Report, and Lifewire. When not writing, he is an avid board gamer and reader with a habit of speed reading long manga sagas.
Jon covers the latest PC components as well as tutorials on everything from how to take a screenshot to how to set up your cryptocurrency wallet. He especially enjoys the battles between the top tech giants in CPUs and GPUs and does his best not to take sides.
Jon’s gaming PC is built around the iconic 7950X3D CPU with the 7900XTX supporting it. That’s all the power it needs to play light indie and casual games, as well as more demanding sim games like Kerbal Space Program. He uses a pair of Jabra Active 8 headphones and SteelSeries Arctis Pro wireless headphones and works all day on a Logitech G915 mechanical keyboard.
Read Full Bio
