NVIDIA RTX™ platform

The NVIDIA RTX platform fuses ray tracing, deep learning and rasterization to fundamentally transform the creative process for content creators and developers through the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture and support for industry leading tools and APIs.

Applications built on the RTX platform bring the power of real-time photorealistic rendering and AI-enhanced graphics, video and image processing, to enable millions of designers and artists to create amazing content in a completely new way.

The RTX platform provides software APIs and SDKs running on advanced hardware to provide solutions capable of accelerating and enhancing graphics, photos, imaging and video processing. These include:

• Ray Tracing (OptiX, Microsoft DXR, Vulkan)
• AI-Accelerated Features (NGX)
• Rasterization (Advanced Shaders)
• Simulation (CUDA 10, PhysX, Flex)
• Asset Interchange Formats (USD, MDL)

The NVIDIA NGX SDK is a new deep learning powered technology stack bringing AI-based features that accelerate and enhance graphics, photos imaging and video processing directly into applications. NVIDIA NGX features utilize Tensor Cores to maximize the efficiency of their operation, and require an RTX-capable GPU. NGX makes it easy for developers to integrate AI features into their application with pre-trained networks.

The Turing architecture’s new Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) includes advanced shading technologies, as well as new features designed to accelerate the graphics pipeline.

Mesh Shading

Mesh shading advances NVIDIA’s geometry processing architecture by offering a new shader model for the vertex, tessellation, and geometry shading stages of the graphics pipeline, supporting more flexible and efficient approaches for computation of geometry. This more flexible model makes it possible, for example, to support an order of magnitude more objects per scene, by moving the key performance bottleneck of object list processing off the CPU and into highly parallel GPU mesh shading programs. Mesh shading also enables new algorithms for advanced geometric synthesis and object LOD management.

Variable Rate Shading (VRS)

VRS allows developers to control shading rate dynamically, shading as little as once per sixteen pixels or as often as eight times per pixel. The application specifies shading rate using a combination of a shading-rate surface and a per-primitive (triangle) value. VRS is a very powerful tool that allows developers to shade more efficiently, reducing work in regions of the screen where full resolution shading would not give any visible image quality benefit, and therefore improving frame rate. Several classes of VRS-based algorithms have already been identified, which can vary shading work based on content level of detail (Content Adaptive Shading), rate of content motion (Motion Adaptive Shading), and for VR applications, lens resolution and eye position (Foveated Rendering).

Texture-Space Shading

With texture-space shading, objects are shaded in a private coordinate space (a texture space) that is saved to memory, and pixel shaders sample from that space rather than evaluating results directly. With the ability to cache shading results in memory and reuse/resample them, developers can eliminate duplicate shading work or use different sampling approaches that improve quality.

Multi-View Rendering (MVR)

MVR powerfully extends Pascal’s Single Pass Stereo (SPS). While SPS allowed rendering of two views that were common except for an X offset, MVR allows rendering of multiple views in a single pass even if the views are based on totally different origin positions or view directions. Access is via a simple programming model in which the compiler automatically factors out view independent code, while identifying view-dependent attributes for optimal execution.

Lifelike visuals result when something both looks and behaves as it would in reality. With more than a decade of development in physics simulation, the RTX platform features APIs such as NVIDIA’s PhysX, FleX and CUDA 10, to accurately model how objects interact in the real world in games, virtual environments, and special effects.

NVIDIA Omniverse is a powerful new collaboration platform for 3D production pipelines based on USD and MDL. 3D applications developers can build portals to connect their products to Omniverse so customers can seamlessly share assets with other industry standard applications.