Ray tracing with millions of light sources: Nvidia shows new technology

Benedikt Bitterli, one of the authors of the work, summarizes the basis of the new technique as follows:

“Our most important finding was the reuse of information from spatially and temporally neighboring pixels to find out which rays have to be traced.”

The idea resemble modern post-processing noise suppression and antialiasingit continues. According to this, however, no pixel colors are filtered directly by the denoiser (denoxifier), but rather probabilities to determine which light beams are relevant and which are not.

To do this, ReSTIR repeatedly scans a set of light sources and places them in a spatial and temporal context. So in the video embedded above up to eight beams per pixel with 3.4 million dynamic light sources calculated in real time.

Mostly an Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 Ti was used. Only a Titan RTX had to be used for the adventure park in order to meet the high demands on video storage capacity.

What do RTX and Co mean? If you do not understand all technical terms immediately, we will explain all the terms around raytracing again in the following article:

8th
2nd

more on the subject

The most important terms around ray tracing explained

What does this mean for ray tracing?

Since ReSTIR is initially a research project, it is unclear whether and when the technology will also find its way into everyday life. However, as ray tracing is playing an increasingly important role both on the home PC and on the NextGen consoles PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, it does not seem unrealistic that we will eventually see parts of the technology in games.