A few weeks ago, we had the pleasure of interviewing Luke Spring, NVIDIA’s EMEA GeForce Communications Lead. In this Q&A interview, we talk about Ray Tracing, RTX Remix, DLSS and more. So, without further ado, here’s our big NVIDIA interview.
DSOGaming: Can you explain in layman’s terms Ray Tracing and Path Tracing?
Luke Spring: Ray Tracing is a way of creating computer-generated images that makes them look incredibly lifelike, especially when it comes to lighting effects.
Instead of just adding light to a scene, ray tracing mimics how real light interacts with objects. It follows the path of light rays, simulating how they bounce off virtual objects and create shadows, reflections, and realistic colors, similar to how our eyes perceive light in the real world. If you trace enough rays of light in a scene (like all of them) you can accurately simulate the physics of light sources reacting with an entire scene – this is Full ray tracing, also known as Path Tracing.
DSOG: Right now, most games use a rasterized/Ray Tracing hybrid solution for their rendering. We’ve also seen a few games using Path Tracing. How far away do you think we are until full ray tracing rendering solutions become the norm?
LS: In the past five years we’ve already seen a huge movement away from fully rasterized games to the rasterized / Ray Tracing hybrid solution you describe. Nearly every title now features some form of ray tracing, from console all the way through to PC, it’s become a crucial tool for developers to create beautiful worlds. At the end of last year, we saw both Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and Alan Wake 2 showcase how stunning full ray tracing can look. Ray tracing is a standard feature in hundreds of titles today and many developers are excited about the future.
Even modders are creating amazing experiences that feature full ray tracing, thanks to RTX Remix. Portal With RTX and Half Life 2: An RTX Remix Project show how good classic game remasters can look when given the full ray tracing and RTX make over. Currently, there are over 11,000 members of the RTX Remix Discord working on path-traced remasters of classic games.
The technology is here and we feel confident that we will see more and more titles in the not too distant future from modders and developers.
DSOG: What’s your favorite Ray Tracing effect/feature and why?
LS: We had a lot of success with Tomb Raider, Battlefield V and Metro Exodus in the early days of ray tracing. I will never forget the first time I saw real-time ray traced reflections in Battlefield V. At that point real time ray tracing was considered a pipe dream. I still find myself watching that trailer and appreciating what we, and DICE, achieved back then – At the time I don’t think many people realized the impact RT and DLSS would have on the industry, now we have over 500 games and apps supporting RTX technologies.
But Metro Exodus was super impactful for helping people ‘get it’ as far as the impact ray tracing would have on the gaming experience. It had ray traced global illumination. Most of the talk until then centered around the increase in image quality.
The Metro Exodus segment NVIDIA demoed at PAX Australia started with ray tracing off. In the demo the player awakens by the sea and follows a path to a shack on the shore. As you walk up to the shack, you see a skeleton before you enter. Everything in the shack is covered with a gray hue, so you know it’s supposed to be dark inside. But the lighting is just not realistic, so the spookiness is lost. Your brain is telling you ‘it’s supposed to be dark in there, there is a skeleton, this is supposed to be spooky’. But, because you can see everything, there’s no mystery.
Then we restart the demo with ray tracing on. Again, standing outside the shack, but this time the shack is dark. Not a gray hue, but dark. You see something, but can’t make it out. As you approach you can make out more elements. At the door, you can barely make out the skeleton as you approach the interior of shack. Its interior is nearly pitch black. It’s more an unsettling hint than stark reality. Once inside, you’re jolted by the skeleton hanging on the wall. Then you break out your lighter and you can see more stuff. And the light from the fire looks like it was made by a real candle. It was crazy.
The result of turning ray tracing on in Metro Exodus changed the gameplay experience from ‘this is supposed to be scary’ to actually being scary. It was very impactful.
Then there’s Alan Wake 2, which of course features full ray tracing. The tech completely transforms each scene – Remedy did an amazing job. Their work on Control was highlighted by the community as one of the best RT implementations out there, and they took it to another level with Alan Wake 2.
DSOG: We’ve seen some developers implementing in their games software-based Ray Tracing solutions that run on all GPUs. Crysis Remastered and Avatar are two of them. Then we have UE5’s software-based Lumen. What’s your opinion on these RT solutions?
LS: It’s great to see RT being adopted by more systems and platforms, we’ve been a firm believer in the technology for a long time. Ultimately, we at NVIDIA are always pushing for the very best visuals possible, and we look to achieve that via a combination of hardware advances and AI solutions.
Our RT cores allow games to run incredibly intensive RT visuals, while DLSS Super Resolution and Frame Generation utilize AI to improve performance. On top of that you have DLSS Ray Reconstruction running an AI denoiser to improve image quality and RT effects even further. We feel this solution will continue to raise the bar when it comes to lifelike PC visuals.
DSOG: In the 20s, NVIDIA shared a lot of tech demos for its GPUs. From the Medusa to The Isle and the Chameleon, all of them gave PC gamers a glimpse at the future of PC graphics. Nowadays though, you haven’t released your Ray Tracing Tech Demos to the public. These tech demos could make more PC gamers understand the benefits of Ray Tracing/Path Tracing, so why aren’t they available for download?
LS: Ultimately our focus is on bringing these technologies to the games that people are playing.
We are no longer waiting years for new technologies to find their feet, we saw RT and DLSS implemented in games very shortly after their initial announcements and the cadence has only increased. The same can be said for DLSS 3.5 where we demonstrated the technology in both Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty on the same day we announced the feature. Gamers then got their chance to experience the new tech a few weeks later when the game’s released. I think this is a testament to how we work with developers and provide them with the tools to implement our technologies early-on.
As for being able to try out these features for free, our RTX technologies are included in some of the biggest AAA free to play titles out there including Fortnite (RT/DLSS/Reflex), CS2 (Reflex) and Apex Legends (Reflex). On top of that, RTX Remix gives modders a chance to integrate our newest RTX technologies in their mods, and give gamers an avenue to try free upgrades of classic games that show off the graphical cutting edge. For example, Portal with RTX (PT/DLSS/Reflex) was the first fully ray traced game with DLSS 3, and was a free upgrade for those that already own Portal, and surely Portal is in everyone’s Steam library?!
DSOG: Let’s talk a bit about RTX Remix. You released its Runtime in April 2023 but the Creator Tool is still not available. When can we expect the RTX Remix Creator Tool to come out?
LS: We are excited to say that the RTX Remix Open Beta is available to download now! Built on NVIDIA Omniverse, NVIDIA RTX Remix allows modders to create stunning RTX remasters of classic games with full ray tracing, NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, modern assets with physically-based rendering, and generative AI texture tools.
We are already seeing some fantastic work-in-progress remasters from the community that people can check out on ModDB.
DSOG: Quake 2 RTX was one of the biggest surprises of 2019. We also know that Half-Life 2 RTX is in development. Are there any plans for RTX remasters of older games? Doom 3, Unreal, Deus Ex, Duke Nukem 3D and other classic FPS games would greatly benefit from Path Tracing.
LS: Other than Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project, which is being made by the Half-Life 2 modding community, we have no other titles to announce. But we are always keeping an eye out for suggestions! Additionally, with the launch of the RTX Remix Open Beta, many more of these types of ‘remasters’ are being developed by the community.
We really encourage anyone interested in RTX Remix mods to join the Discord group where a community of 11,000 modders are utilizing RTX Remix to turn RTX On in over 80 games. It will take time for many of these projects to be completed but the future of path-traced RTX modding is bright. We can’t wait to play them!
DSOG: DLSS introduced Super Resolution. DLSS 3 added Frame Generation and DLSS 3.5 brought Ray Reconstruction. What’s the next step for DLSS?
LS: We’ve continued to improve and update DLSS since its introduction in 2019 so it’s safe to say we have more to come. We’re always working to give gamers better performance and the best graphical experience possible, and that’s what we’ll continue to do in future iterations of DLSS.
DSOG: Are there any plans to enable DLSS 3 FG for the older RTX GPUs? We know that due to the lack of the Optical Flow Accelerator, DLSS 3 FG won’t be as good on these GPUs as on the RTX40 series. Still, a lot of RTX owners could be interested in enabling it, especially since FSR 3.0 now works on all GPUs.
LS: We built DLSS Frame Generation to deliver the best possible experience including FPS, frame pacing, image quality, and latency across V-SYNC/VRR display modes. Achieving this uncompromised experience requires use of dedicated hardware available on RTX 40 Series GPUs.
DSOG: AMD recently launched AFMF, via which you can enable frame generation in all DX11/DX12 games. Is NVIDIA looking into adding a similar driver-based frame generation feature for its GPUs?
LS: Without proper frame pacing and latency reduction technology natively integrated into the game, driver-based frame generation will likely struggle to generate good image quality and effectively manage latency, resulting in visual artifacts and laggy experience.
DSOG: Thank you very much for the interview, any last words you want to share with our fans?
LS: Thank you all for your support over the years. We love PC gaming and will continue to do our best to bring the best experiences and technologies to the space.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
A lot of corporate non answers but we can read between the lines. Thanks for your efforts.
“Without proper frame pacing and latency reduction technology natively integrated into the game, driver-based frame generation will likely struggle to generate good image quality and effectively manage latency, resulting in visual artifacts and laggy experience.”
Not really answering the question, I wish you push them further with something like with FSR that able to achieve without specialize hardware like Nvidia always claimed.
Why? What he said is the truth ……
Nvidia could do it but they won’t because it cannot meet their minimum standards of quality. Let AMD put out the half assed stuff ….. Nvidia has a stellar reputation in the Professional Engineering Community (As illustrated by the stock price the last year) and aren’t going to risk that reputation just to please a few comsumer gamers nor should they.
I bet most people here don’t actually know what Omniverse is despite it being used by all the major university research projects including Generative AI, Defense research, NASA research, electronics design, automotive manufacturing and design, pretty much all the major movie and TV studios, robotics …. oh yeah and game development
The problem is they also half assed their own customer by locking feature on each generation and not making real progress in raw performance (ehm 3060 Ti and 4060 Ti fiasco). In the end they sold that feature just by locking it out of their own product from the last gen while it actually able to do it. Regarding to standard, they sell that card also to gamer so in my opinion they should listening to their gamer customer. If they just sell it to professional, its up to them to set the standard to the professional customer they target. In the end, all that sales matter, either from gamer or ‘professional’. If they kept doing the same kind of tactic of dissapointing their customer there is a chance they will to the way of intel (the refusal of many cores and many threads CPU), yes it will take a long time probably to reach that point,and its bad for customer during that time (like nowaday) until someday the power will eventually shifts and they start competitive again
Same thing at AMD ….. there is no real difference between a 6600XT and a 7600XT …….
The power isn’t going to shift anytime soon, Nvidia released their quarterly Earnings Report today and they didn’t just hit a home run it was a record breaking Grand Slam. A 265% increase in revenue year over year
If you increased your output at work by 265% would you ask your employer to cut your wages …. or would you expect a raise?
And why would you expect Nvidia to act any differently than you yourself would?
Tell them their blurry, ghosting causing, temporal BS technologies can go to Hell.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ee091d1098168375c892e11453531b98b28526eb28724cbca22b1268ec473a8b.gif
How nice of you to post that GIF of the Linux Overlord himself there! 🙂
BTW, I’ve heard that Leather-Jacket Jensen still holds a grudge against the Linux community, but nevertheless was forced to play along our rules in the end, simply because we kept trolling him by breaking the kernel part of his proprietary driver with each new release, to the point that he was forced to open-source the Linux kernel part of NVIDIA’s driver:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/bbf6f41edf3a5819e7225195f8b4277c2650372fdf2f04b5e497cfad5645ecaf.png
My understanding is that what NVIDIA did was move more driver functions to the firmware, and then release an open source kernel module that wasn’t much more than what they had always released but now it didn’t need the closed source portion as well since it had all been integrated into the firmware. I think this change did make it easier for third-party driver and hardware monitor projects to reverse engineer things and make their software work, but from what I read there wasn’t much in the way of addition benefits beyond that.
BTW: Never forget that I’m also a Linux user, and have been since 2003/2004.
Edit: And yes, I was already aware that that was Linus Torvalds in the GIF. That’s a pretty legendary clip of him.
“temporal BS” that’s the entire gaming industry today, it’s called TAA and is used in 99.9% of games, many of which does not give the user the option to disable.
TAA, DLSS, DLAA, FSR2, XeSS, etc all do temporal blending of frames as part of their anti-aliasing. From what I’ve read an NVIDIA employee is the one who invented Temporal Anti-Aliasing, and NVIDIA seems to have been instrumental in pushing it as the primary form of anti-aliasing in deferred rendered games. After all when games are extremely blurry already from horrible technologies like TAA, then they’ll often look just fine when subsampled and temporally upscaled by things like DLSS and FSR2, so obviously the companies making this cr*p (such as NVIDIA) aren’t going to want gamers to be able to turn off anti-aliasing or to have any alternatives to the temporal smear that all games seem to use these days, that way gamers never see just how bad these horrible technologies are making games look.
Personally I refuse to play games that have no way to turn off the temporal vaseline. The blurriness is bad enough, but I absolutely can not stand the ghosting. It literally ruins gaming for me, and I’d rather just not play the game at all.
It’s used in every form of video processing too …. Even Blue Ray 4K or 8K is highly compressed using temporal processing to predict the next frame.
If you played at a higher resolution/dpi, then the blurring you’re seeing from most TAA wouldn’t be an issue. I personally hate playing games without TAA. But I play at 4K with DLDSR. Test it out for yourself.
TAA is an amazing low cost jaggy/shimmer reduction tech which is far more annoying than blur, even if I experienced it. And it does a better job of removing aliasing than even MSAA 8x which is substantially more expensive.
TAA is the worst form of anti-aliasing ever developed. It causes ghosting during rendering which there is nothing you can do to prevent. It literally ruins my gameplay, and I refuse to ever play any game that forces me to use TAA.
The higher the DPI and frame rate the lower the blur. So when it comes to high end gaming, it really is the best option. I remember playing Forza Horizon before they added TAA/DLSS. Even with MSAA 8x and DLDSR 2.25x I couldn’t get rid of the aliasing around car edges. Drove me nuts. With TAA it’s all gucci. Just up DPI and frame rate and you’re good.
Firstly, you shouldn’t have to supersample a game to overcome the shortcomings of the anti-aliasing tech it uses. That’s just ridiculous. The so-called problems that TAA is intended to solve can be solved in other ways, and better forms of anti-aliasing that don’t cause blur can be used instead, and then we could all just play games at native resolution with crystal clear great looking visuals.
Secondly, there’s still the ghosting problem that TAA and all other temporal technologies (DLSS, FSR2, XeSS, TSR, etc) cause. This can not be solved by supersampling. It can only be solved by turning that temporal BS off.
As for MSAA not taking care of all aliasing, try adding another form of anti-aliasing on top of the MSAA with ReShade. CMAA2 for instance was developed to be paired with MSAA to improve its quality, and make a 2x MSAA look like a 4x MSAA, and since it’s a post-processing AA it’s going to be able to detect and smooth out aliasing that MSAA can’t.
Of course there’s also Sparse Grid Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SGSSAA) which can be used with MSAA, and eliminates all aliasing. It’s more effective than TAA, without the drawbacks of TAA. Of course it only works with games that support MSAA, it only works when MSAA is turned on, it needs to be enabled from NVIDIA Profile Inspector in the profile for your game (its a hidden feature of NVIDIA graphics drivers), and if you don’t set it to the same sampling level as MSAA then it will crash your computer (which is probably why NVIDIA never added it to the NVIDIA Control Panel). You will also need to know the correct compatibility bits for your game, otherwise it won’t work.
I don’t normally use SGSSAA due to the FPS hit, and the fact that I can be happy with the anti-aliasing that I can add with ReShade. I don’t need all aliasing eliminated, I just need the worst of it to be under control. I have also found a couple of sharpening shaders that when used together seem to eliminate all shimmering.
Great interview thanks
Honestly, first and foremost, congratulations on expanding your reach as to interview nvidia staff directly. Hoping to see more interviews coming (that don’t lend themselves to just banal marketing BS). This one wasn’t substantial really but it’s a good start.
Good interview! There’s so many terms I can’t keep them straight anymore lol.
As a side note, I watched all 3 of those vids and prefer RT OFF by a good margin. I feel like Im going crazy as if a bunch of people are shouting 2+2=5 and I know that isnt right but I keep hesitating and thinking maybe what if Im wrong. Driving me nuts!
Ha, interesting because I’ve noticed the same thing a couple times, and it happens especially when areas are too dark, which in turn happens because only 1 or 2 bounces are being calculated and we’d need more to get proper light propagation, though sometimes it also happenes in areas that become somewhat weirdly flatly illuminated. 🤷🏻♂️
All in all though, despite some weird cases, it makes a massive positive difference.
“LS: We built DLSS Frame Generation to deliver the best possible experience including FPS, frame pacing, image quality, and latency across V-SYNC/VRR display modes. Achieving this uncompromised experience requires use of dedicated hardware available on RTX 40 Series GPUs.”
i hate this corporate speak, so how much latency is there in 3000 series vs 4000?
They need to add Fsr3 like nonRtx frame generator. But it’s has no profits.
Raytracing is a complete failure. It requires $600 GPU. It tanks your FPS. And as LTT showed, people can’t even tell the difference with rasterisation.
It’s like a lot of things with gaming. It got pushed out the door before it was ready. Gamers knew for a long time that RTRT was in the distant future but at some point they stopped knowing that and bought into Nvidia’s hype that ray tracing could happen now.
Technically that is true but only in small implementations and even that is too demanding for mainstream gaming hardware.
Until some material or combination of materials is found to replace silicon and incredibly increase GPU performance while being affordable to mainstream gamers then fully implemented RTRT isn’t going to happen.
I think pushing for 4k on consoles was equally disastrous as it contributes to asset loading stutter for 4k texture streaming (dead space remake and RE4 remake comes to mind), shader compilation stutters and whole host of other optimization issues. Most console games can’t still reach true 4k image quality. Some even go as low as 720p. 1440p60fps for current gen should’ve been the target. That way developers would’ve been forced to optimize to reach 60 fps, which would’ve benefited pc as well.
nvidia has to make under 300 gpus again and i dont mean the 3060 6gb. When that happens ray tracing can matter until then making affordable gpus is the most important thing. “LMAO BUY 300 PLUS AND USE FRAME GEN” isnt gonna cut it.
Gsync Pulsar tech next time please 😉
The part about BFV was interesting, and i do agree with him about that. It’s wild how far we have come. Sadly, the prices have come far too… way too far.
thanks for the interview hope more to come 👍
Can they kindly not ask for an arm and a leg for their midrange gpus?
These standalone cards make no sense at the prices and the power reqs. Nvidia has been gimmicky for a long time remember hairworks in tw3? gahbage to sell cards etc A lot of non answers like others observed, you’re better off looking at what they do instead of say because 1984 double speak is the standard for these pr agents.
Nvidia makes AI chips for the awful future we are having slowly forced onto us, it’s just the conditioning has been gradual. They then manip the market and manage it, likely own a large peice of amd as a controlled opp for “competition”. Intel was never that serious about their own graphics cards imo, similar to the gpu thing intel controls that market for pc anyways, it’s a cartel syndicate and when you’re that wealthy you buy all your opposition, likely on the QT to then have “competition”.
I think RT is for the benefit of them more than us, as it’s easier to just have that system rather than to have to do some handcrafting, likely it’s a labor saving thing and thus you need less people to work on it. Gaming is really a hobby that’s dying while spreading farther, race to the bottom all around.
I would like see a duke nukem 3d rtx as well
“real time ray tracing was considered a pipe dream. ”
It is still a pipe dream. we have half baked faketracing on very weak piss poor hardware.
nice interview bro , nvidia i think must add like afmf frame gen solution for all rtx gpu for cpu limitation reason with old games and application youtube video emulator etc its a plus
Unless your game is made up of nothing but reflective puddles of water, ray tracing is useless, it’s way too slow.
That read like it was sponsored, which is not a surprise as nvidia reports earnings next week and will not allow bad press to spoil things.
Given the company’s current spot price (pumping 45% over the past month on no news), all potential growth is priced in. The slightest amount of headwinds in guidance will cause a crash that will be remembered for years.
What is amazing is how fast Nvidia’s Market Cap has grown since the business world started chasing after AI. Their share price has grown by 214% in the past year. They now have the fifth largest Market Cap (1.78 trillion USD) of the largest Corporations in the world even beating out Amazon a little.
Largest corporations in the world by Market Cap:
1 Microsoft
2 Apple
3 Saudi Aramco
4 Alphabet (Google)
5 Nvidia
lol AMD got elegantly BTFO’d in the last answer. Nvidia needs real competition, not this panting, sweating, sloppy second copycat fail company with an annoyingly loud and obsessive cult following
A polite way of saying “That technology amd implemented sucks big balls” and “We at Nshitia have higher standards”.
And yes, he is correct. The people at nvidia could’ve done this years ago, but what’s the point if good image quality is not achievable with simple upscaling (Amd’s amfm is based on FSR’s upscaling, that why it sucks. FSR 2 is image reconstruction (for the unknowledgeable who don’t get the difference))?
The same goes for Nvidia’s dlss version 3.5 and introduced frame generation.
People don’t get it that the while the rtx 3000 series could do it too, the results in image quality and performance would be worse, because these gpus lack the dedicated transistors (accelerators) as optical flow accelerators.
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Nobody even discusses RTX remix to the original Unreal.
😥
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Thanks for the interview.
Obviously it’s incredibly shallow and all questions/answers have been discussed/agreed before writing the article. Lol
But that’s always the case whatever media, outlet, writing.
Would like to seem some more interesting questions and topics talked about.
Your positivity is like a refreshing breeze, blowing away the clouds of negativity. Thank you for the breeze of joy!
As a 4090 owner would have been great to ask / highlight the drawbacks of Ray Reconstruction and Path tracing in its current form. Looks great for still screenshots and videos with very slow panning shots/motion. But as soon as you start moving fast everything becomes a ghosting / smearing / oily mess and this is from someone gaming on an OLED.
With CP2077 i’ve just defaulted to the standard RT and RR for the reflections but tbh the standard RT without RR looks sharper and crisper in motion RR does improve lighting slightly but at the cost of overall clarity and introduction of smearing/ghosting, more so when used with framegen, which is a prerequisite to enable any of the features above anyways.
“Gratitude is the currency of the heart, and your posts are the treasures that enrich our emotional bank. Thank you for the valuable deposits!”
“Gratitude is the armor that shields us from negativity. Thank you for reinforcing our defenses with your motivational posts!”
Cheaper GPU’s > Ray Tracing!
Even though I may have a high end card, Most don’t.
Until ray tracing can be done at 4k 60 on low end cards in the latest triple AAA game then forget it!