NVIDIA Confirms Ampere’s Ray Tracing Benefits With Marbles at Night Demo
NVIDIA released an impressive demo of Marbles at this year’s GTC 2020, designed to showcase next-gen realistic graphics powered by ray tracing. Now, during the announcement of the Ampere gaming accelerators, the company has presented an updated demo – Marbles at Night.
The first version ran at 1080p on a single NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000 accelerator, which was responsible for complex real-time physics and ray tracing. There were some problems with full-screen anti-aliasing and other minor artifacts during real-time execution.
The new version of the demo runs smoothly already at 1440p on a single GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card, uses DLSS intelligent scaling, and has no visible aliasing defects or anything like that. NVIDIA Marbles at Night RTX is still a fully physically modeled gaming level with millions of polygons, but unlike the first version, here the action takes place in the dark, hundreds of artificial light sources are actively used and an abundance of shadows is noticeable. In one of the scenes, by the way, you can still see the bust of the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang.
The demo is intended to illustrate the capabilities of RTX on the Omniverse platform. It is a powerful NVIDIA multi-GPU real-time modeling and collaboration platform for 3D graphics production pipelines, based on Pixar’s Universal Scene Description and leveraging the power of NVIDIA RTX.
Although NVIDIA describes the demo as a physics and ray-tracing minigame, it is still not clear when the company is going to release Marbles or Marbles at Night to the public domain (if at all). That would be a nice advertisement for RTX ray-tracing technologies.
