In today’s digital content creation world, speed matters. Just ask anyone today working on a graphics-intensive project – which is just about everything these days, from VFX-heavy films, to cinematic-quality work in television, to lifelike computer games, to VR/AR/MR, and more. And that’s just in media and entertainment alone!
One of the big news announcements from GTC 2019 for the media and entertainment realm is that Nvidia RTX raytracing-accelerated applications will be available to 3D artists and designers this year, as leading 3D tool vendors such as Adobe, Autodesk, Dassault, Epic, Unity, and others will incorporate RTX in their 2019 product releases.
As a result, artists will be able to interact with complex models and scenes with raytraced lighting, render photoreal images faster than before, and take advantage of new AI-based capabilities to speed the production process.
“When you are building or bringing a character to life for your movie, the ability to visualize your creation with correct lighting and accurate materials, rather than a low-resolution approximation, dramatically improves your workflow,” says Greg Estes, vice president of developer programs at Nvidia. “We’re thrilled with the broad industry adoption of RTX, which speaks volumes on how real-time raytracing is transforming the 3D market.”
RTX is built on the Nvidia Turing GPU architecture, which features RT Cores, the industry’s first on-GPU hardware designed specifically for raytracing, and Tensor Cores, for AI acceleration. Launched at SIGGRAPH 2018, RTX has since gained support from some of the leading software providers.
Raytracing is important to artists and designers because it simulates the behavior of light in the physical world. However, it has been too computationally intensive for artists to reasonably use in viewing and interacting with their creations. Instead, they view a low-fidelity representation during the creation process, and then wait hours to see the final image after it is rendered out on CPUs. With RTX technology, they can now interact with raytraced images and complex models in real time, whether the GPUs reside in the cloud, in the data center, or on the desktop.
Among the first leading vendors to offer RTX acceleration in their 2019 produces are:
- Adobe: Dimension & Substance Designer
- Autodesk: Arnold & VRED
- Chaos Group: V-Ray
- Dassault Systèmes: CATIALive Rendering & SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2019
- Daz 3D: Daz Studio
- Enscape: Enscape3D
- Epic Games: Unreal Engine 4.22
- ESI Group: IC.IDO 13.0
- Foundry: Modo
- Isotropix: Clarisse 4.0
- Luxion: KeyShot 9
- OYOY: Octane 2019.2
- Pixar: Renderman XPU
- Redshift: Renderer 3.0
- Siemens: NX Ray Traced Studio
- Unity Technologies: Unity (2020)