What is a Ray Tracing GPU?
Ray tracing is a popular rendering technique in 3D computer graphics. It is used to trace ray paths to enhance the precision and effects of light, shadow, and reflection. A few years ago, ray tracing was thought to be best for computer images and television VFX due to its high rendering time. However, due to GPU acceleration through hardware improvement, real-time ray tracing has become the new normal. This has significantly increased ray tracing application areas.
What is a Ray Tracing GPU?
A ray tracing GPU is the graphics card that has the hardware to support the rendering technique. Ray tracing brings realistic-looking shadows, lightning, caustics, reflections, and immersion into the virtual world. However, getting all this into games and other applications is a complicated task. Hence, only specific GPUs with high hardware capabilities can support it. These GPUs are what we call ray tracing GPUs.
The ray tracing GPUs introduce new workloads, such as denoising image and ray/triangle intersection, of the hardware. Ray tracing GPUs are capable of rendering various visual effects. Some of these optical effects include reflection, scattering, dispersion, and refraction.
You can use E2E Networks’ cloud servers to get the best out of the ray tracing GPUs. Our NVIDIA GPU cloud servers come at affordable rates to help you efficiently manage large volumes of data and complex programs. Using our NVIDIA GPU cloud servers allows you to seamlessly explore various ray tracing techniques, including reflections, shadows, illumination, and caustics.
What are the Different Ray Tracing Techniques?
You can use ray tracing in multiple ways ranging from reflections to shadows to illumination to caustics and ambient occlusion. Below-mentioned are some of the standard ray tracing techniques popularly used in the gaming domain and other fields.
- Ray traced reflections
Ray tracing casts rays on various reflective surfaces, including water and glass. It then captures the reflections and projects it on the screen. To better understand it, we can take the example of Battlefield V, the first game that used real-time ray tracing. It specified surfaces, such as glass and water, that reflect light rays. Ray tracing then, casts rays on the reflective surfaces and projects the screen’s output for precise reflection effects.
- Ray traced shadows
The ray tracing technique casts rays on characters and objects that can block light to provide realistic-looking shadows. There can be multiple light sources coming from different angles, which can make shadowing difficult. Ray tracing allows you to segregate light traces from various sources and curves, making it easier to manage each ray individually.
- Ray traced illuminations
With their ray tracing capabilities, NVIDIA GPUs allow you to precisely model the effect of light and how it bounces from objects. This lets you quickly implement global illumination systems into games, engineering, and several other application areas.
- Ray traced caustics
Caustic is a phenomenon of focusing and projecting the light rays reflected by curved or imperfect surfaces. While many attempts have been made, especially in the gaming domain, they were not accurate enough to create realistic caustics. Ray tracing allows you to render life-like caustics.
Which GPUs Support Ray Tracing?
The latest NVIDIA graphics cards from the RTX edition support real-time ray tracing. Some of the names to be familiar include the following:
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Super
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
- Nvidia Titan RTX
Applications of Ray Tracing GPUs
Ray tracing has been well-known for its applications in the media and entertainment field. It is used to capture shadows and reflections in a frame precisely for a more realistic look. However, ray tracing applications do not limit to media and entertainment, many other fields can leverage ray tracing too.
- Developing games
Ray tracing has become the buzzword in the gaming world. Gaming developers thrive on making their games more realistic, and what better technique than ray tracing? With ray tracing, developers can introduce practical reflections and life-like shadows into games.
There are shadows and reflections in games without ray tracing support too. But the significant difference between the shadows and reflections is that they are static or not dynamic. The shadows and reflections without ray tracing are just a package of animations bunched together, which will always be the same. On the other hand, ray tracing enabled reflections are more dynamic and realistic. Some of the majorly popular games using ray tracing are:
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
- Battlefield V
- Fortnite
- Minecraft: Bedrock Edition
- Dirt 5
- Watch Dogs: Legion
- Spider-Man: Miles Morales
Similar to rays, ray tracing can also track sound waves. Hence, developers can also use it for more immersive sound and echo in video games. Although there is not much exploration done in this ray tracing application, hardware advancements will undoubtedly bring this into effect shortly.
- Training AI models for image recognition
Training complex AI models for image recognition requires GPU acceleration. Not directly, but ray tracing can help accelerate the training procedure. NVIDIA has some great deep learning GPUs, majorly the ones that are recently launched. However, ray tracing can further accelerate it with the help of precise shadow and reflection capturing.
Deep learning models are trained with data and images in the case of image recognition. Due to the lack of precision in each image, developers have to use millions of pictures to train a single deep learning model. Ray tracing can help increase the accuracy, thereby reducing the time required to prepare the models. However, the developers may still have to train the models with numerous images; the results will be far better when trained with ray tracing frames.
Its sound waves tracing capabilities bring in the possibility of becoming a useful application in the voice recognition area. It can help denoise sound waves so that developers can train deep learning models faster.
- Product design and virtual prototyping
Ray tracing is useful in all the stages of product designing and prototyping, right from the designing and evaluation to creating images for sales. Engineers and designers use them to create a clear and realistic looking design for proposing. The manufacturers then use it to build and test the product virtually using graphics.
When all the evaluation is complete and the product comes into the market, the sales and marketing team can also use ray tracing. The marketing team can create amazing images of the product for promotion. They can also use it to display the usage of the product realistically.
- Designing architecture
Similar to product designers, architects can use ray tracing and its precision to design a blueprint of any structure. Unfortunately, hand-made designs cannot produce realistic illuminations. Several computer programs that can design model objects cannot model shadow and light precisely.
Computer-aided design (CAD) programs allow architects to introduce light by providing location, distribution, orientation, and color. But still, they do not come anywhere close to ray tracing. Backward ray tracing can precisely render architectural design by creating realistic images.
- Engineering
Ray tracing is fully capable of rendering global illumination models. Global illumination is a term used to describe a system model that can consider all of the light, including the direct and indirect light (shadow and reflection) in an environment. The global illumination model helps engineers simulate light behavior in real life and build a model accordingly.
- Animation
Ray tracing has paved the way for several new possibilities in the animation world. Traditionally, the process of creating animations was very complicated and required a lot of time. The introduction of ray tracing in animation has eliminated the need to work separately on the shadows and reflections, as it can all be done in a single frame now.
Animation artists can use ray tracing to add fancy shadowing effects for a more realistic feel. We can see some of the recent uses of ray tracing in popular animations like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Toy Story.
To put it simply, any industry that requires the use of computer-generated imagery or rendering can benefit from real-time ray tracing. The best way to leverage ray tracing is with NVIDIA servers on E2E Networks’ cloud. NVIDIA offers some of the best GPUs, and with our Windows cloud servers, the benefits of NVIDIA GPUs are further enhanced. Hardware advancements in GPUs can further increase the potential ray tracing application areas.
Why Use Ray Tracing GPUs on E2E Networks’ Cloud Server?
Ray tracing has proven to be useful in multiple areas. By using ray tracing GPUs on E2E Networks’ cloud servers, you can further enhance the former’s benefits. Let’s consider an example of a deep learning neural network. AI and deep learning have become some of the most significant technological advancements in today’s world.
Training deep learning neural networks require great quality GPUs to train complex models with optimal accuracy. The same is valid for medical and scientific research, where you need to process big data for the best results. We provide the best GPU for deep learning. Our Windows cloud server allows you to easily set up NVIDIA GPU with CUDA, Anaconda, Jupyter, Keras, and TF. Here are all the GPU cloud servers we offer.
Based on one of the best Tesla GPUs, the TU104 NVIDIA GPU is well known for its fast-paced, precise performance. Tesla T4 is well suited for AI projects to pace up ML and deep learning training processes.
Based on NVIDIA Volta architecture, Tesla V100 has 640 Tensor Cores and provides 900GB/s bandwidth.
RTX8000 is one of the latest NVIDIA graphics cards with 576 Tensor cores, 72 RT cores, and 100G/s bidirectional bandwidth.
By providing extraordinary acceleration to AI projects, NVIDIA A100 becomes the best GPU for machine learning. Powered by the ampere architecture, it provides a bandwidth of 1.6TB/s.
By running the vGPU on E2E Networks’ Windows cloud, you can deliver a full Quadro experience with optimal security.
Apart from just the GPU servers available, there are many more reasons to choose our cloud services for ray tracing GPUs. Some of the notable benefits you get are:
- We provide world-class infrastructure for Windows cloud servers for perfect shadow, reflection, and illumination capturing.
- You can choose from numerous pricing plans according to your needs.
- With E2E clouds’ top Windows cloud servers get a fast-paced solution for real-time ray tracing.
- Gain faster access to resources with reduced latency and higher bandwidths.
- With our 99.9% uptime, you can solely focus on your application without worrying about the cloud computing.
- We deploy multiple network security protocols to ensure the complete safety of your data and applications.
- No long-term commitments required; you can pay on an hourly basis.
While these features and benefits are tempting enough, there’s much more that you can get by running your ray tracing applications on E2E Networks’ GPU cloud servers. With multiple pricing options and pay on the go features, we allow you to buy Windows cloud servers at a very affordable price for all your ray tracing applications.
ConclusionRay tracing is one of the most significant leaps in 3D Computer Graphics, and with NVIDIA GPU Cloud server providing real-time ray tracing support, you can include the real-world feel to your games and other applications. You can choose E2E Networks’ NVIDIA GPU cloudservers for all your needs. You can refer to our page for getting the NVIDIA GPU cloud pricing.
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