Nvidia Demonstrates Interactive Ray-tracing

Nvidia demonstrated the new release of the Application Acceleration Engine, AXE 2.0. The new version is optimized to run on the new Quadro Fermi cards, but will run on any G92 or later generation cards. These engines allow for interactive ray-tracing where the user can interact with the ray-traced scene quickly without an extensive wait for re-rendering.

Nvidia’s 'mental images' division also demonstrated its iRay application, which takes the above capabilities and adds physically correct global illumination to the features. Global illumination is critical for correct lighting in most 3D digital content creation and the ability to view and interact with a globally illuminated scene will greatly accelerate the ability of artists to work quickly. In addition iRay supports network distributed rendering across GPUs.

GPU-rendered image from Bunkspeed SHOT using iray

Nvidia partners like The Foundry, RTT, and Bunkspeed also demonstrated their applications making use of CUDA-accelerated interactive ray-tracing. RTT’s application actually calculated airflow over the model and rendered the model, interactively, both using CUDA, while Bunkspeed’s SHOT uses mental images' iRay to provide interative ray tracing and global illumination.

In a few GPU generations, these can be expected to proceed from ‘interactive’ to ‘real-time’ and we should start seeing the use of real-time ray-tracing and global illumination in games.

  • makotech222
    Yeah i was amazed at the viper pic, sooo realistic!
    Reply
  • dragonsqrrl
    Rendering scenes using ray-tracing and global illumination takes freakin FOREVER, even on the i7 based workstations at school. I'm amazed at how quickly you're able to preview a scene using the hardware acceleration provided by Nvidia's latest generation of GPU's. It's literally just a matter of seconds based on the videos I've seen.

    This really does make "interactive" ray-tracing possible for the first time on a desktop... awesome. This is the sort of application the Fermi architecture really excels at. The emphasis Nvidia places on this market is probably the main reason I'll be going with a Fermi based solution for my next build, and not an Evergreen.
    Reply
  • JonathanDeane
    So were probably less the 10 years off from being able to have games based on real time ray tracing, this makes me happy for some reason.
    Reply
  • Blessedman
    I remember back in the day (late 80's) when Amiga had it's big hay day with ray tracing, there were pundits that said that real time ray tracing would never be a reality. This was back when a single frame would take days to render in a farm. Oh how far we have come.
    Reply
  • crashmer
    Great you found my viper! thanks
    Reply
  • jsm6746
    whatever happened to openrt... the last news post on the site is from '07...
    Reply
  • Cons29
    i gave Maya a try before, fun, but needs time to learn. and yes it takes long to render a realistic scene, add that to my not-so-good settings being a noob and all :)
    this is good news. so are there 3d modeling applications that makes use of the gpu? maya/3ds?
    Reply
  • Draven35
    The F-18 frame is one frame while someone was interacting with it. The image refines as it rests. The Bunkspeed shot of the viper probably took a minute, maybe two. Before iray 'refines' the image, you can still get an idea for how the lighting and GI will look, well enough to make lighting decisions.
    Reply
  • matt87_50
    dragonsqrrlRendering scenes using ray-tracing and global illumination takes freakin FOREVER, even on the i7 based workstations at school. I'm amazed at how quickly you're able to preview a scene using the hardware acceleration provided by Nvidia's latest generation of GPU's. It's literally just a matter of seconds based on the videos I've seen. This really does make "interactive" ray-tracing possible for the first time on a desktop... awesome. This is the sort of application the Fermi architecture really excels at. The emphasis Nvidia places on this market is probably the main reason I'll be going with a Fermi based solution for my next build, and not an Evergreen.
    i7 970 extreme (the old quad core one) = 48 Gflops, these video cards = 1000 to 2000 Gflops.

    pwned.



    any demos of real time raytracing? (20, 30fps, reasonable res ect)

    obviously images like the above which look REAL aren't gonna be real time yet, but some form of awesome raytracing might be.
    Reply
  • matt87_50
    hey, that viper pic: is it just the car that is rendered, then composited with a picture? or is the whole terrain rendered too? I could scarcely believe that...
    Reply