NVIDIA is rumored to bring the next generation of DLSS 3.0 to the Ampere GPU architecture, benefiting from improved RT Core light-tracking units that will double the number of light-tracking units in each SM unit and actually provide four times the performance of the existing Turing architecture.
NVIDIA announced the new Ampere architecture at the GTC 2020 on the 14th of May in a video format, but the new A100 GPU is now released for enterprise users, and the next one will be the GeForce graphics card for home users.
According to NVIDIA, the new “ampere” architecture will replace the existing Turing and Volta architectures, and the “ampere” architecture will use the 7nm process, which is touted as the greatest leap in performance of the last 8 GPU generations.
In addition to the next-generation DLSS 3.0, NVIDIA researchers are developing a new ReSTIR (Reservoir-based Spatiotemporal Importance Resampling) light-tracking algorithm that reproduces dynamic direct lighting and shadows from millions of sources in real-time.
“Our most important insight is the reuse of information from spatially and temporally adjacent pixels to tell us which light to track. The idea is similar to modern post-processing noise reduction and anti-aliasing, but while noise reduction filters the pixel colors directly, we use filter probability to guide the light to reduce future noise. This study allows us to intuitively illuminate the scene by placing any number of emitting objects to project dynamic shadows.”
Traditionally, games have used some solutions to enhance dynamic light emitters to create complex light and shadow effects, and in newer RTX games, dynamic area light effects have been retrofitted with physically correct shadows, but due to technical limitations, the light and shadow budget is still somewhat limited and only about a dozen areas in the game scenario are dynamic shadows.
The effective rendering of millions of dynamic light sources using the Monte Carlo algorithm remains a major challenge even in an offline rendering system, but with the new ReSTIR algorithm it is possible to render scenes interactively and in high quality by repeatedly scanning a series of light patterns from a candidate and applying the resulting patterns to similar messages and objects in the environment without obtaining complex light structures and global light parameters, enabling millions of light and shadow effects in-game scenes.