It has always been a matter of when, not if, real-time
ray tracing would see widespread support. Looking to scoot things along, NVIDIA debuted its
RTX hardware last year, which leverages
Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API. It has still been a relatively slow process, in terms of developer support, but things are progressing. As it relates to that, NVIDIA today announced that its OEM partners have implemented ray tracing support into 10 new RTX Studio laptops and mobile workstations.
"RTX Studio laptops and mobile workstations are moving rapidly to the center of the creative industries," said Jason Paul, general manager of GeForce software and technology at NVIDIA. "They put real-time ray tracing, advanced AI and video editing in ultra-high resolution within easy reach of creators, delivering capabilities in a mobile form factor that once required an entire studio."
These new designs come from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Boxx, and bring the combined tally to 27 models. The new configurations cover a variety of budgets and use-case scenarios, ranging from consumer laptops with
GeForce RTX 2060 GPUs inside to professional mobile workstations rocking Quadro RTX 5000 graphics. Specifically, NVIDIA is highlighting the following models...
These are all part of
NVIDIA's Studio platform, which essentially mean they combine RTX GPUs with NVIDIA's Studio Stack consisting of specialized SDKs and Studio drivers.
In related news, NVIDIA also announced an updated Studio driver. The latest driver is optimized for the latest releases of several creative applications supporting ray tracing, including Magix Vegas Pro v17, Autodesk Arnold, Allegorithmic Substance Painter 2019.2, Blender 2.80, Cinema 4D R21, and Otoy Octane Render 2019.2.
The latest driver release also introduces support for 30-bit color across all product lines, including GeForce and Titan. This helps with reducing or eliminating banding. For example, 24-bit color support allows for 16.7 million of shades of color, while 30-bit color support bumps that number to over 1 billion shades.
There are several apps that can leverage 30-bit color, such as Adobe Photoshop and Premier Pro, Audodesk RV, Colorfont Transkoder, Assimilate Scratch, and Foundry Nuke.
What does this all mean? Well, on the developer side, real-time ray tracing (and, by extension, RTX) support is growing by the day. We all want to see more games implement RTX effects, and those will come as well. Giving developers more supported tools is key to growing the ecosystem, and that is what NVIDIA is championing at SIGGRAPH. In short, ray tracing is starting to arrive in earnest.