I've heard of ray tracing on the computer as early as the days when I owned an Amiga. It's a way of generating images by tracing the path of light where it hits a virtual object. This technique can generate some awesome images, but it takes a lot of processing power.
NVIDIA is going to have Volta GPUs the ability to do real time ray tracing, which is a pretty big deal. Microsoft is helping here with full support for RTX with DirectX. For game makers, GameWorks SDK will get a ray tracing denoiser module.
There were a few companies at GDC that showed a demo of this in action. Unity, Epic Games, and Remedy each had some impressive demos that showed the power of this technique.
With support for this coming in the next card, we're going to get some pretty impressive looking graphics for sure using ray tracing and seeing it happen in real time is something's that's really a sight to behold.
