Nvidia aims for film-quality path tracing and backs Microsoft's shader delivery

At GDC in San Francisco Nvidia told developers that future games will reach film-level graphics only by "fully leaning into AI to cross that chasm between what's attainable [now] and what's attainable in film rendering." The company admitted, "We're still not to where we want to be.

We want that the real-time images to look indistinguishable from reality. We want them to look like a film." Path tracing is already possible thanks to ASICs in GPUs—specifically RT cores that accelerate calculations for ray intersections and determine which object a ray has hit among tens of thousands.

Upscaling and frame generation, both using AI, reduce the performance cost and create additional pixels. Nvidia has suggested a future where path tracing performance versus a Pascal-era GPU could be a million times greater, and has already shown elements like the RTX Mega Geometry foliage system and DLSS's 6x frame generation mode.

nvidia, path tracing, film-quality, real-time, ai upscaling, frame generation, rt cores, dlss, rtx, gdc