Unity has partnered with NVIDIA to start cashing in on the promise of the latter’s latest line of graphics cards. NVIDIA’s RTX graphics cards are based on the company’s new Turing architecture, designed to accelerate a rendering technique called ray tracing to be performed in real-time. Now, Unity is taking advantage of that capability by offering early access for real-time ray tracing in the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates light rays bouncing around a 3D scene. As such, it gives incredibly photorealistic results, but at the cost of being computationally intensive.The ability to perform ray tracing in real-time will allow Unity developers to produce higher-quality visuals for real-time applications like video games.
Take the example in the picture above, wherein Unity and NVIDIA showcased the photorealism of ray tracing with the 2019 BMW 8 Series Coupe.The image on the left is the real car; the image on the right is the car rendered in real-time on Unity. The images aren’t indistinguishable, but it’s not easy to guess which is which.
“As part of our commitment to best-in-class visual fidelity graphics, we rolled out the preview of the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) last year—a highly-optimized, state-of-the-art raster-based solution capable of achieving stunning graphics in real-time on consumer hardware,” said Unity’s Natalya Tatarchuk. “We built HDRP with the future in mind and today we’re excited to announce that we are working with NVIDIA to adopt its RTX real-time ray tracing capabilities so we could bring this technology to all. Real-time ray tracing moves real-time graphics significantly closer to realism, opening the gates to global rendering effects never before possible in the real-time domain.”