A row of red lanterns reflected in a warrior’s shining scales of armor. Shadows cast by children running down the paved pathway of an open-air market. A lit carriage reflected onto colorful ceramic vases that line the street.
These stunning ray-traced reflections and shadows will soon enhance the game environment of Justice, one of China’s most popular massively multiplayer online games — or MMOs.
This level of realistic detail was previously impossible to render because some of the objects being reflected were off-camera, and shadow mapping techniques couldn’t support shadows of this quality.
But with real-time ray tracing and performance-enhancing Deep Learning Super Sampling technology, our GeForce RTX graphics aim to bring increased realism to the game, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told the audience at the GPU Technology Conference in China this week.
Gamers first experienced the potential of GeForce RTX graphics cards when Battlefield V’s ray-tracing effects were released earlier this month.
And last week’s new Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition benchmark showed off the new DLSS technique. DLSS allows the GPU to generate some pixels with shaders and imagine others with AI, boosting performance while maintaining smooth, clear image quality.
Justice will use both real-time ray tracing and DLSS simultaneously. Part of the wuxia fiction genre, the MMO chronicles the adventures of martial artists in ancient China. Ray-traced reflections will bring lifelike reflective properties to game elements like weapons and water, enabling them to accurately reflect the game world around them.
And ray-traced shadows overcome the limitations of traditional shadowmap techniques to create more complex, physically correct shadows for a more realistic and immersive experience.
Justice will also be the first game to feature real-time, ray-traced caustic effects. These occur when light rays are reflected or refracted by a curved surface, like a body of water.
Used at 25×14 or 4K resolution, DLSS can accelerate Justice game performance by up to 40 percent compared to default settings.
Huang also revealed that another popular martial arts MMO, JX3 Online, will incorporate DLSS. The upgrade will launch in early 2019.
JX3 Online and Justice are the latest games to announce support for real-time ray tracing and DLSS. So far, dozens of developers have signed up to add RTX features to their games.