NVIDIA couldn't resist revisiting its real-time ray-traced Apollo 11 mission graphic demo for the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. NVIDIA claims that the revisions to the demo made it possible to more accurately convey the moment when Buzz Aldrin followed Neil Armstrong and set foot on the surface of the moon. Aldrin's comments have been added to the demo.
The biggest improvement concerns lighting. Real-time ray tracing has made it possible to simulate the reflections of sunlight from the lunar module and even spacesuits - glowing highlights and various shadows have become even closer to what the public saw in television frames and photographs compared to the 2014 version for Maxwell and .
NVIDIA assures that this is another stone in the garden of conspiracy theories that claim that landing a man on the moon was a hoax. Ray tracing calculates the direction of light beams bouncing off the environment on their way to the camera, which means taking into account the position of the Sun and its effect on the environment. The demonstration is intended to show that natural lighting created exactly the picture that the public saw in the photographs.
But, of course, this is primarily advertising, with the help of which NVIDIA shows the capabilities of its GeForce and Quadro graphics accelerators equipped with hardware ray tracing units and supporting DirectX Raytracing. The demo is meant to show how far modern consumer real-time graphics technology has come. It is possible to reconstruct even small details of a historical scene on home equipment.
Unfortunately, this RTX tech demo is still not available for public download.
Source: 3dnews.ru