Outside of the features covered by Direct3D 11.3, NVIDIA will also be adding features specifically to drive a new technology they are calling Voxel accelerated Global Illumination (VXGI).
At the highest level, VXGI is a manner of implementing global illumination by utilizing voxels in the calculations. Global illumination is something of a holy grail for computer graphics, as it can produce highly realistic and accurate lighting dynamically in real time. However global illumination is also very expensive, the path tracing involved taking up considerable time and resources. For this reason developers have played around with global illumination in the past – the original version of Epic’s Unreal 4 Engine Elemental demo implanted a voxel based global illumination method, for example – but it has always been too slow for practical use.
With VXGI NVIDIA is looking to solve the voxel global illumination problem through a combination of software and hardware. VXGI proper is the software component, and describes the algorithm being used. NVIDIA has been doing considerable research into voxel based global illumination over the years, and has finally reached a point where they have an algorithm ready to go in the form of VXGI.
VXGI will eventually be made available for Unreal Engine 4 and other major game engines starting in Q4 of this year. And while the VXGI greatly benefits from the hardware features built into Maxwell 2, it is not strictly reliant on the hardware and can be implemented through more traditional means on existing hardware. VXGI is if nothing else scalable, with the algorithm being designed to scale up and down with hardware by adjusting the density of the voxel grid, which in turn influences the number of calculations required and the resulting accuracy. Maxwell 2 for its part will be capable of using denser grids due to its hardware acceleration capabilities, allowing for better performance and more accurate lighting.