NVIDIA RTX Lights Up the Night in Stunning Demos at GTC

RTX Direct Illumination enables cinematic-quality lighting with real-time rendering, while RTX Technology Showcase lets users to experience power of real-time ray tracing.
by Nicole Castro

NVIDIA is putting complex night scenes in a good light.

A demo at GTC21 this week showcased how NVIDIA RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) technology is paving the way for realistic lighting in graphics. The clip shows thousands of dynamic lights as they move, turn on and off, change color, show reflections and cast shadows.

People can also experience the latest technologies in graphics with the new RTX Technology Showcase, a playable demo that allows developers to explore an attic scene and interact with elements while seeing the visual impact of real-time ray tracing.

Hero Lighting Gets a Boost with RTXDI

Running on an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 GPU, the RTXDI demo shows how dynamic, animated lights can be rendered in real time.

Creating realistic night scenes in computer graphics requires lights to be simulated all at once. RTXDI does this by allowing developers and artists to create cinematic visuals with realistic lighting, incredible reflections and accurate shadows through real-time ray tracing.

Traditionally, creating realistic lighting required complex baking solutions and was limited to a small number of “hero” lights. RTXDI removes such barriers by combining ray tracing and a deep learning algorithm called spatio-temporal importance resampling (ReSTIR) to create realistic dynamic lighting.

Developers and artists can now easily integrate animated and color-changing lights into their scenes, without baking or relying on just a handful of hero lights.

Based on NVIDIA research, RTXDI enables direct lighting from millions of moving light sources, without requiring any complex data structures to be built. From fireworks in the sky to billboards in New York Times Square, all of that complex lighting can now be captured in real time with RTXDI.

And RTXDI works even better when combined with additional NVIDIA technology, such as:

Learn more and check out RTXDI, which is now available.

Hit the Light Spots in RTX Technology Showcase

The RTX Technology Showcase features discrete ray-tracing capabilities, so users can choose to turn on specific technologies and immediately view their effects within the attic scene.

Watch the RTX Technology Showcase in action:

Developers can download the demo to discover the latest and greatest in ray-tracing innovations with RTX Technology Showcase.

Check out other GTC demos that highlight the latest technologies in graphics, and a full track for game developers here. Watch a replay of the GTC keynote address by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to catch up on the latest graphics announcements.