Bart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸Apr 10, 2023

Path tracing is the future of video games rendering, no doubt. Not convinced?

Watch this video, the difference is stunning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-ORt8313Og

Every light and every single emissive polygon casting shadows and multi-bounce GI?
No problem, no hacks needed.

A ton of research and work from my Nvidia colleagues and folks at CDPR went into it.

Cyberpunk 2077 Ray Tracing: Overdrive Technology Preview on RTX 4090

YouTube
Show threadStefan IvanovskiApr 10, 2023
@BartWronski How much more research would there need to be after real-time pathtracing becomes feasible for most games? How close would we get to having computer graphics as a whole being close to solved (for practical purposes)? Even though these amazing innovations have taken place and I'm amazed by the pace of research, I feel a bit discouraged as a newcomer to the field to be honest. What are your thoughts?
Show threadNathan Reed

@lmpxl @BartWronski there's still tons of research on light transport going on - path tracing itself is far from a solved problem! ReSTIR for example is a very recent innovation that has dramatically shaken up the field.

Even in a hypothetical "path tracing everywhere" future, there will still be a need for research toward: light transport perf and robustness, large scale scenes, streaming and LOD, geometry and material representations, volumetric media, animation and physics, etc...

Apr 10, 2023 at 9:01pmWeb
Show threadNathan ReedApr 10, 2023
@lmpxl @BartWronski And then there's the ML side of things - I'm sure we've only barely begun to see the ways that differentiable programming and ML models can be advantageous in graphics and animation.
Show threadBart Wronski 🇺🇦🇵🇸Apr 10, 2023
@reedbeta @lmpxl everything you mentioned plus things like denoising path tracing (latest flavor of DLSS does an exceptional job on those 1spp images, but it can be improved for sure) :)
then things like path traced (real) motion blur and DoF, combining this with nanite-like geometry, infinite LOD etc. etc.