what is nvidia
It designs graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets, as well as system on a chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Its primary GPU product line, labeled "GeForce", is in direct competition with Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD) "Radeon" products.
graphics processing unit
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device.
A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a single-chip processor primarily used to manage and boost the performance of video and graphics. GPU features include:
- 2-D or 3-D graphics
- Digital output to flat panel display monitors
- Texture mapping
- Application support for high-intensity graphics software such as AutoCAD
- Rendering polygons
- Support for YUV color space
- Hardware overlays
- MPEG decoding
These features are designed to lessen the work of the CPU and produce faster video and graphics.
A GPU is not only used in a PC on a video card or motherboard; it is also used in mobile phones, display adapters, workstations and game consoles.
This term is also known as a visual processing unit (VPU).
The graphics in videos and games consist of polygonal coordinates that are converted into bitmaps – a process called “rendering” - and then into signals that are shown on a screen. This conversion requires the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to have a lot of processing power, which also makes GPUs useful in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other tasks that require large number of complex and sophisticated computations.
Before the arrival of GPUs in the late 1990s, graphic rendering was handled by the Central Processing Unit (CPU). When used in conjunction with a CPU, a GPU can increase computer performance by taking on some computationally-intensive functions, such as rendering, from the CPU. This accelerates how quickly applications can process, since the GPU can perform many calculations simultaneously. This shift also allowed for the development of more advanced and resource-intensive software.
DEFINITION of 'Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)'
A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a chip or electronic circuit capable of rendering graphics for display on an electronic device. The GPU was introduced to the wider market in 1999, and is best known for its use in providing the smooth graphics that consumers expect in modern videos and games.
What is ray tracing?
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that can produce incredibly realistic lighting effects. Essentially, an algorithm can trace the path of light, and then simulate the way that the light interacts with the virtual objects it ultimately hits in the computer-generated world.
We've seen in-game lighting effects become more and more realistic over the years, but the benefits of ray tracing are less about the light itself and more about how it interacts with the world.
Ray tracing allows for dramatically more lifelike shadows and reflections, along with much-improved translucence and scattering. The algorithm takes into account where the light hits and calculates the interaction and interplay much like the human eye would process real light, shadows, and reflections, for example. The way light hits objects in the world also affects which colors you see.
With enough computational power available, it's possible to produce incredibly realistic CG images that are nearly indistinguishable from life. But that's the problem: even a well-equipped gaming PC only has so much GPU power to work with, let alone a modern game console.
Ray tracing is used extensively when developing computer graphics imagery for films and TV shows, but that's because studios can harness the power of an entire server farm (or cloud computing) to get the job done. And even then, it can be a long, laborious process. Doing it on the fly has been far too taxing for existing gaming hardware.
Instead, video games use rasterization, which is a much speedier way to render computer graphics. It converts the 3D graphics into 2D pixels to display on your screen, but rasterization then requires shaders to depict reasonably lifelike lighting effects.
The results just don't look quite as natural or realistic as they would with ray tracing. The benefits of this technology probably won't seem individually mind-blowing, but the collective enhancements could really elevate the realism of interactive game worlds.
Who is working on ray tracing?
Microsoft is the biggest fish in this new video game ray tracing pond, as the company announced DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in the Direct X 12 API. They've created the structure for introducing and computing rays in the world, and have made it possible for developers to begin experimenting with the technology to see what's possible in their game engines.
And they're not alone: Microsoft has been working with several of the world's biggest game makers and game engine creators to help introduce ray tracing into PC games. Electronic Arts' Frostbite and SEED engines will be compatible, along with the ubiquitous Unreal Engine and Unity engine seen throughout the industry.
Creators can get started right away, too, thanks to an experimental DXR SDK available now. Microsoft will share further insight at GDC 2018 this week.
Bringing ray tracing to life in games requires incredible GPU power, so unsurprisingly, Nvidia is also leading the charge. The company's RTX technology leverages a decade of work on graphics algorithms and GPUs, and they're working closely with Microsoft's DXR API to get developers up to speed quickly.
According to Nvidia, "film-quality algorithms" and updates to their GameWorks API will deliver lighting, reflections, shadows, and related effects with a previously-unseen level of fidelity. And Nvidia's incoming Volta-class GPUs will be compatible, of course.
And AMD won't be left behind, either. They haven't shared as much as Nvidia yet as of this writing, but they have announced "real-time ray tracing" capabilities via their ProRender rendering engine and Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2. However, AMD's announcement seems less focused on games at this point, and more about improving developers' workflows and results with a blend of ray tracing and rasterization.
what is nvidia geforce?
GeForce is a brand of graphics processing units designed by Nvidia. As of the GeForce 10 series, there have been fourteen iterations of the design.
