NVIDIA published his Path Tracing SDK v1.0.0which, according to the company itself, “combines years of best practices in real-time ray tracing and neural graph development to create a real-time path tracing tool.”

The Path Tracing SDK is basically a component that was introduced in the toolkit (a set of tools) of the green giant’s RTX, making it available to developers and related to ray tracing, the real-time lighting technology recently popularized by NVIDIA and the main driver in the video game sector.

Road striping is a complicated and computationally expensive technology., so it’s not within reach of the home sector at the moment. If we summarize a little what it is, it is a way of rendering images of three-dimensional scenes, with the help of which the lighting tries to be true to reality. This illumination is then reduced using the surface reflectance function to determine how much will go into the camera. This process is repeated with each frame.

Due to his approach is the arrangement of communications more focused on creating realistic 3D images in architectural visualizations or product design than game developmentbecause the second context, at least for now and with current technology, is not feasible.

NVIDIA explains that the Path Tracing SDK v1.0.0 makes it easy to use path tracing to “accurately recreate the physics of all light sources in a scene to reproduce what the eye sees in real life. This new SDK gives you the flexibility and customizability to take advantage of NVIDIA’s proven technologies.” Also SDK relies on technologies such as DLSS 3, RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI), NVIDIA real-time denoiser, opacity micromap to improve ray tracing performance, and reordering shaders to get the most out of Ada Lovelace’s generation of graphics.

Path Tracing SDK v1.0.0 is simply not playable, at least for now. It’s important to note that neither Unreal Engine nor Unity have plugins that can use it yet, but if it arrives, it wouldn’t be used for video game development under current conditions because of how expensive path tracking is. at the computational level..