(Credit: Nvidia)
Nvidia has developed a new path tracing algorithm that could make it far easier for developers to implement advanced lighting techniques in their games, TechPowerUp reports. It makes it look better, too, by reducing visual errors, making it unnecessary to use some of the emulation techniques currently required for path tracing to function.
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Nvidia has been at the forefront of real-time ray-traced lighting effects for close to a decade. It helped kickstart it for modern games with the launch of the RTX 2000-series in 2018, thanks to their onboard RT accelerator cores, and it's only gotten stronger since. Path tracing, a more realistic form of ray tracing, has been used by some games since, but its high demands mean it's still used sparingly. That may change following Nvidia's latest update.
Following the release of Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination in 2019 and Reservoir-based Spatiotemporal Importance Resampling in 2020, path tracing became far more viable for developers. They reduced the hardware requirements for running these kinds of lighting effects, and Nvidia's new Reservoir-based Spatiotemporal Importance Resampling for Path Tracing Enhanced (ReSTIR PT Enhanced) algorithm takes several major leaps in enhancing performance and quality in equal measure.
The new algorithm reportedly renders path-traced lighting up to 3x faster while reducing visual and numerical errors, requiring less denoising. This could be massive news for developers of existing games with path tracing, as future updates could make it far easier to run. However, the impact on future hardware could be more dramatic. Next-generation consoles could benefit from cheaper-to-run path tracing, especially when it's combined with upscaling and frame generation to further improve performance.
"We halve the spatial reuse cost by reciprocal neighbor selection, robustify shift mappings with new footprint-based reconnection criteria, and reduce spatiotemporal correlation with duplication maps," Nvidia's abstract from its research paper claims.
If Nvidia's performance claims are credible, it could open up midrange and older graphics cards to run much more advanced ray-traced lighting, finally democratizing one of the most gatekept visual features in modern gaming.
The specific details on how it achieves this will be revealed when Nvidia showcases the new algorithm in a technology demo at the ACM conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in May. Nvidia notes, however, that the technology is still under development and that any real-world gaming examples will not be ready for quite some time.