What is Ray Tracing?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
962 words · ~4 min read
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thanks for watching techwiki click the subscribe button then enable
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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos
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unless you're sitting in complete darkness i'd like for you to do me a
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favor take a look around the room you're in and notice a spot on the wall
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then draw a line out of your eyes towards that spot and then follow it on
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the angle that it would take towards the light source in your room
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congratulations you've just done the same thing that
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happens in ray tracing a graphics rendering technique that's been in the
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tech news quite a bit lately on the heels of the launch of NVIDIA's touring
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family of gpus which tout real time ray tracing as a way to get better looking
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games but what exactly is ray tracing well to understand ray tracing it helps
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to know why it's considered a step up from the traditional method by which
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games draw or render scenes onto your screen
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most games today use a technique called rasterization
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where the game code will direct your GPU to draw a 3d scene with polygons
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these two-dimensional shapes usually triangles make up most of the visual
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elements that you see after the scene is drawn it gets
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translated or rasterized into individual
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pixels which are then processed by a shader which affects colors textures and
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lighting effects on a per pixel basis to give you a fully rendered frame then you
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do this 30 or 60 times per second depending who you ask and you've got
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yourself a fully responsive video game to enjoy
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but while rasterization has served us well for a long time trying to
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approximate an image by translating 3d shapes onto a 2d screen and then using
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shaders to estimate what the lighting should be has inherent limitations
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because this method of rendering has a hard time tracking exactly how light
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should travel and bounce within a certain scene
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ray tracing does a much better job of this and you've actually probably been
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enjoying it without knowing it for years if you've gone to any recent movie that
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features cgi effects what made this possible in movies though
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is that big budget productions have the luxury of lots of money to render those
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effects on large server farms a process
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that can take months and uses much more computationally intensive techniques
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with many bounces for each photons and a
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huge number of light rays coming from each source just check out this still
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life created with a ray tracing program you would be forgiven for thinking that
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it is a real photograph at first glance okay so ray tracing is amazing right
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let's use it for everything well not quite the downside of ray
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tracing is the computational cost and
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the average 20 something gaming at home doesn't have millions of dollars or a
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rendering server and on top of that games have to be rendered at at least 25
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or so frames per second not one frame per day as has been the case in some
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pixar films so instead of tracking
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however many trillions of rays that come from each light source consumer grade
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ray tracing lessens the computational load by instead tracing a path from a
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virtual camera that represents the user's eyes through a single pixel then
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to whatever object is behind that pixel and finally back to the inseam light
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source for added realism if whatever that ray
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bounced off of absorbs or diffuses the light like a rough rock or a tree trunk
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the ray tracing algorithm can take these additional rays of light into account as
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well so that any refraction effects or shadows are displayed accurately
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and because lighting is such an important aspect of achieving a
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convincing 3d render once this process is completed for each pixel your GPU can
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throw out some insanely detailed images like any new GPU feature though it'll
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come down to industry support now on the hardware side given AMD's professional
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grade ray tracing solutions we'll probably see both teams add support in
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the future as for the game developers
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well there's no guarantee so all we can really do is hope that you won't end up
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paying a premium for some feature that you'll never actually use
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like that time that you were planning to get ripped on your new wii fit
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speaking of things you'll actually use check out private internet access not
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only does private internet access work on up to five devices at once hiding
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your true ip address and allowing you to bypass geo restrictions and censorship
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by making you appear as though you are connecting from somewhere else it also
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blocks unwanted connections to help prevent attacks autoblocks all traffic
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if the vpn disconnects it keeps your data out of the hands of advertisers and
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other snoops and even includes mace pia's built-in malware blocker pia
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supports multiple vpn protocols and encryption levels allowing you to dial
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in the exact level of protection you need they've got apps for Windows mac
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Android iOS Linux and a chrome extension and they've got over 3 000 servers in 28
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countries with no user activity logs so
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check them out at the link below so thanks for watching guys like dislike
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