For several years, real-time ray tracing has been the buzzword in the computer hardware market, especially the graphics processing unit (GPU) department. Your gamer friends probably said you should upgrade the months-old desktop to feel the much-coveted RTX experience. Some may even talk about it like it is the Second Coming. In case you are still not entirely clear what the fuss is all about, a light reading may help.
The term “ray tracing” refers to a CGI visualization process by tracing the paths of light from a camera into a scene. It is a graphics rendering method that can simulate the behavior of real-world lighting in a digital environment. The result is a photorealistic visual treatment in vivid details, accurate shadows, and lifelike reflections, even on murky water surfaces.
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Cost of real-time ray tracing
Some of the most advanced consumer-level GPUs with real-time ray tracing functions will set you back anywhere from around $500 to $2000. For end-users, the cost to get their hands on the feature is the amount of money they spend on a hardware configuration capable of the visualization process. The same thing applies to companies in the CGI businesses, like animation production and architectural rendering companies.
If a company wants to develop a proprietary system for real-time ray tracing, hiring competent professionals is one of the first things on the checklist. Based on recent job openings at NVIDIA, the base salary range for senior systems software in the GPU department is around $144,000 – $270,250, depending on experience and location. In the hardware category at the same company, senior engineers earn an annual base salary of $176,000 – $274,000.
According to BLS, computer hardware (GPU is hardware) engineering designers earn a median annual wage of $128,170. The highest ten percent make more than $208,000, whereas the lowest ten percent is paid less than $77,100. Some industries pay more than others; the computer and peripheral equipment manufacturing sector is among the top employers with a median annual wage of $131,560, second only to the Research and Development industry with an average salary of nearly $165,000 yearly.
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Ray tracing in real-time
Believe it or not, real-time ray tracing is nothing new in CGI. It has been used for decades in filmmaking, specifically visual effects and animation. The technology also allows for a seamless blend between live-action footage and CGI. In filmmaking and architectural renderings, the visualization process is done with a GPU farm consisting of dozens of computers to generate photorealistic imagery. A single frame can take hours (if not days) to fully render. Recently, real-time ray tracing services have received much attention from everyone, not because it is a groundbreaking technology, but thanks to its penetration into the consumer market.
Everything you see in the world results from light bouncing off objects in your view. The light source can be natural, like the sun and moon, or artificial. Visible light is a form of photon-laden electromagnetic radiation that human eyes can perceive. Light can be described simply as a rush of photons traveling to the eyes. Something appears very bright because you have many photons coming your way. Refraction happens when photons (always traveling in a straight line) hit a transparent surface and pass through the substance.
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The straight line is, therefore, bent or redirected. Reflection occurs when photons bump into a reflective surface and bounce off it. When your eyes stop seeing an object because you move your head around or the electricity goes out, the photons from that particular view-creation process disappear. Many factors affect how things look: distance, surface properties, color, materials, and density, among others. The direction and intensity of the light also play a significant role in determining how you see the objects.
Ray tracing in CGI does the process in reverse. It generates an image by tracing the rays of light from a seeing eye (an imaginary one, a camera) to objects. The camera acts as the source of light, so determining its position and direction of light should be more practical. Another good thing is that every object in the image created by the real-time 3d rendering designer will be visible to viewers.
Tracing all rays of light from all directions is inefficient because many of the effects never end up being parts of that image; in other words, it is a big waste of computational power. GPU with ray tracing capabilities works by a complex algorithm that accounts for the various view-affecting factors, such as objects’ properties and light sources. For example, two lampposts with an identical shade of red will never look the same if one is made of metal and the other is wood.
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The materials react to light in different fashions. Because metal has a shinier surface than the other, it will reflect an amount of light and illuminate nearby objects to an extent since it acts as an indirect light source. Transparent or translucent object, like water or clear plastic, refracts light. If you dip a length of a pencil into a glass of water, the pencil appears as if it breaks. An object produces shadow when positioned directly in the path of light. The shadow of an object visible on a wall just behind it will naturally appear darker than if the wall is standing further behind. Ray tracing imitates those natural phenomena accurately.
Applications of ray tracing
Every 3D modeling design business offering CGI services can benefit from ray tracing. The most prominent industries include filmmaking, marketing (product animation and rendering), architectural visualization, and games.
Videos and Movies
Animated movies, or those that feature a blend of live-action and CGI, have been using the technology since the 1970s. Monster University (2013) has its place in CGI history as the first film to use ray tracing for all its shading and lighting. Most modern big-budget animated movies take advantage of the visualization process because it is the best currently available to mimic the natural behavior of lights in a digital environment.
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Product Marketing and Architectural Visualization
Regarding ray tracing, both product marketing professionals and 3D architectural visualization firms use the technology similarly. It is used for visualization to depict (or render) digital objects in the most photorealistic way possible. In some cases, a visualization is intended to be more vivid than what the eyes can naturally perceive. For example, a 3D render of a house presents the object in black and white. The rendering uses ray tracing, but the color representation is deliberately made to give the thing artistically.
Games
Ray tracing has been a mainstay of CGI in filmmaking and rendering for years. The final visualization result is impressive in every way imaginable. Still, it comes at a cost: the massive processing power required to produce/render a single complex, high-resolution scene. A render farm helps ease the burden, and you have to pay to borrow the hardware resources. Ray tracing application in video games, however, is a different beast.
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Unlike films and 3D product modeling services where the camera (light source) positions are predetermined before the rendering task begins, games must allow players to control a single camera constantly in motion depending on where the character moves and looks. Constant movement means a rapidly changing viewpoint, even more so in a fast-paced military shooter and racing games. The rendering has to happen in milliseconds to deliver consistent graphics quality, which brings us to “real-time” ray tracing.
In delivering true-to-life gameplay renders every scene, there is a monumental GPU task for a console or PC. At the same time, it is impossible to borrow hardware resources from a render farm while playing a game. Like in other applications, ray tracing in games calculates the paths of millions of virtual photons in the scene. Considering the nature of gaming, where players always make the characters move about, the GPU has to work out where, when, and how exactly all the reflections and refractions happen in no time.
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A significant part of the fuss about real-time ray tracing can be sourced from the release of RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 by NVIDIA, the first consumer-grade graphics card to support the feature. More advanced GPUs from the company and competitor AMD have also been released since. Thanks to the breakthrough, new consoles and laptops promise to handle the taxing computational power of real-time ray tracing.
Casual gamers might even say that, finally, their favorite war games can display a “true-to-life” reflection of an exploding battle tank on the shiny surface of a rifle. Such impressive achievement is usually the case, but it is only partially correct about the visualization technology. As consumer-level GPUs stand today, they still need the computational power to tackle the challenge of real-time ray tracing at high framerates. However, the hardware is engineered to cheat the process effectively. The GPUs cheat using approximations (albeit the brilliant ones) to deliver a gameplay experience as if it is processed by ray tracing. It is not true-to-life, but the result is uncannily similar visual effects without requiring as much computing power.
How Cad Crowd can help
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