In modern devices is this why dedicated hardware blocks within the GPU are needed to support ray tracing? Furthermore is there any way to implement ray-tracing on older GPU through some type of software emulation (at I assume a high performance cost)?
jmccann
special hardware
My understanding is that the basic hardware accelerator NVIDIA uses is for BVH traversal. However, this is a word-of-mouth thing. I haven't, e.g., looked at their patents or found anyone who has de-capped and reverse-engineered the silicon.
older GPUs
NVIDIA supported (not-quite-real-time) ray-tracing on GPUs for a long time with OptiX. Apparently the RTX APIs look an awful lot like OptiX.
In modern devices is this why dedicated hardware blocks within the GPU are needed to support ray tracing? Furthermore is there any way to implement ray-tracing on older GPU through some type of software emulation (at I assume a high performance cost)?
My understanding is that the basic hardware accelerator NVIDIA uses is for BVH traversal. However, this is a word-of-mouth thing. I haven't, e.g., looked at their patents or found anyone who has de-capped and reverse-engineered the silicon.
NVIDIA supported (not-quite-real-time) ray-tracing on GPUs for a long time with OptiX. Apparently the RTX APIs look an awful lot like OptiX.