We saw the Apollo 11 a while back, before the release of the Maxwell-based GPUs. Back then the demo was based on Voxel Global Illumination. Now that Nvidia RTX graphics cards are here, Nvidia has rebuilt the demo and we can see what it looks like with real-time ray tracing technology instead. Here we are going to look into the Nvidia RTX Apollo 11 moon landing tech demo.
The Nvidia RTX Apollo 11 moon landing tech demo was presented by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, at GTC Europe and the following is what he had to say in this regard:
This is the benefit of NVIDIA RTX. Using this type of rendering technology, we can simulate light physics and things are going to look the way things should look.
The new Nvidia RTX Apollo 11 moon landing tech demo looks very detailed and it appears as if you are right there. You might not feel the same way if you think that we never landed on the moon but that is another matter entirely.
It is also worth mentioning that we do not have any games available right now that support features like Nvidia RTX real-time ray tracing so users would appreciate if this demo was made public.
Our Turing architecture allowed our demo team to do this because it’s able to trace the path of a beam of light back from the screen — or frustum, as computer scientists call it — and bounce around a scene to render reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion, global illumination and other visual phenomena in an instant.
Nvidia RTX graphics cards are on the market now and we are waiting for the RTX 2070, which is the minimum requirement for Nvidia RTX real-time ray tracing. It will be interesting to see what kind of performance the RTX 2070 will have to offer as compared to its bigger brothers.
Let us know what you think about the Nvidia RTX Apollo 11 tech demo and whether or not you would like to run the demo on your own graphics card.
