Henry Cavill is a gamer. Keanu Reeves is a gamer. Games were pastimes for a few, but few still appreciated them. It is now woven into all aspects of popular culture, even if its global dimension goes beyond film, sports, or television.
And why not? Smartphones have brought billions to games. Consoles are hundreds of millions more expensive. But computer games, always great, have become a cultural phenomenon celebrated on esports arenas by tens of thousands of screaming fans, and another 500 million online audiences around the world.
Globally, more than 2.7 billion gamers are not in a place where games as a cultural event have not developed, even though the technology behind them is still evolving.
Introduced in 2018, real-time beam tracking support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards gives game developers control over lighting, shadows, and reflections previously only available to leading filmmakers.
Born with NVIDIA graphics, Deep Learning, born from gaming, now makes graphics sharper and smarter.
All major brands of NVIDIA Max-Q designed notebooks and next-generation mobile desktops offer console performance so gamers can play great games anywhere. As a result, gaming laptop sales have increased 12-fold in six years.
And cloud gaming, thanks to a long and continuous investment in our GeForce NOW service, provides high-quality games available for the following billions of devices: PCs, Macs, and unattended smartphones.
Nvidia is at the forefront of all these next-gen technologies that are now spreading across the gaming industry and accelerating the outbreak everywhere.
Light, camera, motor
Beam tracking, which simulates the movement of light in the real world, has long been a staple of the film. Movies rely on powerful banks of servers, called render modes, to customize each scene.
The hardware beam tracking features built into NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards have enabled the use of this movie tool and enabled developers to create more immersive environments. But the change goes beyond realistic highlights, shadows, and reflections.
Real-time beam tracking helps game developers move faster and gives players much more freedom. By simulating the movement of light, real-time beam tracking frees developers of careful pre-cakes in every scene. Hardware accelerated beam tracking also makes it easy to create this pre-calculated illumination. GPUs speed up this process by an order of magnitude compared to traditional approaches.
See an example from Minecraft.
By adding real-time lightning paths to a game that represents the world with Minecraft on RTX, Minecraft’s blocking environment becomes more cinematic. …
