Survey of Nvidia RTX Technology

Nvidia RTX is a proprietary hardware-accelerated ray tracing technology. Since implementation details are unknown, there were many questions in the development community about the hardware implementation: which stages of the ray tracing pipeline are hardware-accelerated and which of them can be effi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Programming and computer software 2020-07, Vol.46 (4), p.297-304
Main Authors: Sanzharov, V. V., Frolov, V. A., Galaktionov, V. A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Applications programs
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science
Graphics processing units
Hardware
Operating Systems
Pipelining (computers)
Questions
Random access memory
Ray tracing
Software
Software Engineering
Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems
Visualization
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Summary:Nvidia RTX is a proprietary hardware-accelerated ray tracing technology. Since implementation details are unknown, there were many questions in the development community about the hardware implementation: which stages of the ray tracing pipeline are hardware-accelerated and which of them can be efficiently implemented in software. In this paper we present the results of our experiments with RTX aimed at understanding the inner workings of this technology. We tried to address the questions intriguing developers around the world: What kind of acceleration can be obtained in practical applications compared to software implementations and what is the technological basis of this acceleration? How arduous is it to develop a rendering system with support for hardware acceleration, which at the same time can work on a GPU without RTX (using software implementation of ray tracing), or even perform calculations on a CPU? How effective is the software emulation of RTX (available on some of the previous generation Nvidia GPUs) and to what extent is it possible to bring its effectiveness to that of the hardware accelerated one? How hard will it be to create an analog of RTX if one needs to run application on GPUs from other manufacturers?
ISSN:0361-7688
1608-3261
DOI:10.1134/S0361768820030068