‘Ray tracing’ could bring the biggest graphics jump in a decade

Ray tracing. It’s a term you’re going to hear a lot now that Nvidia has announced professional and consumer graphics cards that use this technique to produce some of the most life-like simulations possible in games and other animations. So, what is ray tracing exactly, and how does it differ from current graphics rendering techniques?

The oversimplified answer is that ray tracing models the behavior of light in real time as it intersects objects in a scene.

It’s a feature that could lead to spectacular new graphics, but has been very hard to pull off because of the computational requirements. But Nvidia is tackling several issues facing ray tracing with a new graphics architecture known as Turing.

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