Author: Kristof Beets, Imagination Technologies, senior director of product management
For any ray tracing is a technique worthy of the name should be familiar to them in terms of AR / VR / XR, product design or simulation work of engineers. Because it is one of the most important since the three-dimensional (3D) graphics birth of graphics technology advances, and it is about to move from profound film and advertising fields embedded mobile, wearable and automotive, as new, more efficient ray tracing approach to entering the market.
If you look at any of the three-dimensional scene, you will find its fidelity depends largely on the light. In conventional graphics rendering (rasterizing process), light texture and shadow maps are precomputed and applied to the scene to simulate the appearance of the scene. However, although the effect can be achieved very beautiful, but it is always limited by the fact that these techniques are only in the simulation of light. Ray tracing simulation of the light is reflected in how the real world, to create a more accurate reflection of the program, transparent, and a light emitting material image.
In real life, virtual beam light source will be irradiated onto the object. Then the light will interact with the object, and then reflected to another surface. The surface properties of the object. Thereafter, the reflected light will not stop, resulting in light and shadow.
Ray tracing computer, or more accurately "track path", the process and the real world to light path is reversed. Light line from the view of the camera is actually emitted out of the corner, the irradiated objects in the scene, then the algorithm calculates how light will interact with the surface depending on the nature of the light irradiated surface. Thereafter, we will continue to track the path of each ray is irradiated on each object, until the return light. The result is a scene is illuminated, lit as if it were the real world of the sun: a realistic reflections and shadows.
Traditionally, due to the computational load is too high, you can not do this in real-time embedded devices (even high-end workstations).
While ray tracing in the game is still very new thing, but many people are already familiar with ray tracing through a three-dimensional animated movies. In "Toy Story 4" (Toy Story 4) in the opening shot, the light reflected by the pit rain is a recent example. However, these scenes need several months to render on a dedicated server cluster, which is not suitable for the game, it must be generated in real time at a rate of at least 30 frames per second in a game scene, even more preferably twice the speed high.
Real-time ray tracing in games was not possible before because of the huge amount of computation involved, but this situation has changed, thanks to the combination of precision rasterization and ray tracing speed of visual mixing together approach. Game run with a ray tracing functionality on your phone will be how good? This will become a reality in the near future.
There is such a problem, although the solution for real-time ray tracing mobile devices have existed for some time, but still not an ecosystem to support it - but this is changing. 2018, NVIDIA (NVIDIA) for the desktop PC market, especially gamers have released the hardware mix of real-time ray tracing. But even at the time of release of the NVIDIA hardware and there is no game, this is a new technology highlights how difficult it is to build eco-have. Now, however, such as Bethesda and Unity, and many game developers have some action, but in 2020 a new generation of consoles will also include some ray tracing. Soon after, ray tracing will begin to appear in other markets - such as AR / VR market.
As a result, with the ray tracing again be on the agenda as well as people begin to experience it on your own computer, you will gradually want to have it, and indeed expect it to appear on your mobile device, VR headset and game consoles. Therefore, in order to keep pace with the times, engineers need to become familiar with the latest technological advances that changed the industry.
