An old joke goes “ray tracing is the technology of the future and always will be”.
A few years after the release of the first desktop-class GPU with dedicated ray tracing hardware the games industry has well and truly arrived in that future - also thanks to a significant contribution from AI, and some foundational compiler technology.
We’ll take a look at the role that NVIDIA’s ray tracing driver and its compiler infrastructure play in running today’s games. This will be accompanied by lessons learned and stories from a journey that led from Saarland University to contributing to Hollywood blockbusters in New Zealand to helping prototype and productize the first game-centric ray tracing API (“DirectX Raytracing”).