It's been a long road for NVIDIA ever since its contributor Turner Whitted worked on Multi-bounce Recursive Ray-tracing started way back in 1978. Jensen Huang says that GPU development and improvement has been moving at ten times what was being demanded by Moore's Law to CPUs - 1000 times every ten years. But ray-tracing is - or was - expected to require Petaflops of computing power. Yet another step that would take some 10 years to achieve.
The answer to that performance conundrum is RTX - a simultaneous hardware, software, SDK and library push, united in a single platform. RTX hybrid rendering unifies rasterization and ray tracing, with a first rasterization pass (highly parallel) and a second ray tracing pass that only acts upon the rendered pixels, but allows for materialization of effects and reflections and light sources that would be outside of the scene - and thus, virtually inexistent with pre-ray-tracing rendering techniques. Now, RT cores can work in tandem with rasterization compute solutions to achieve reasonable rendering times for ray-traced scenes that would, according to Jensen Huang, take ten times more to render in Pascal-based hardware.
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Ray Tracing is being done all the time within 1 Turing Frame; this happens at the same time as part of the FP32 shading process - without RT cores, the green Ray tracing bar would be ten times larger. Now, it can be done completely within FP32 shading, followed by INT shading. And there are resources enough to add in some DNN (Deep Neural Network) processing to boot - NVIDIA is looking to generate Artificially-designed pixels with its DNN processing - essentially, the 110 TFLOPS powered by Tensor Cores, which in Turing render some 10x 1080 Ti equivalent performance, will be used to fill in some pixels - true to life - as if they had been actually rendered. Perhaps some Super Resolution applications will be found - this might well be a way of increasing pixel density by filling in additional pixels to an image.
The move from GTX to RTX means NVIDIA is putting its full weight behind the importance of its RTX platform for product iterations and the future of graphics computing. It manifests in a re-imagined pipeline for graphics production, where costly, intricate, but ultimately faked solutions gave way to steady improvements to graphics quality. And it speaks of a dream where AIs can write software themselves (and maybe themselves), and the perfect, Ground Truth Image is generated via DLSS in deep-learning powered networks away from your local computing power, sent your way, and we see true cloud-assisted rendering - of sorts. It's bold, and it's been emblazoned on NVIDIA's vision, professional and gamer alike. We'll be here to see where it leads - with actual ray-traced graphics, of course.
