Unity and Nvidia bringing real-time ray tracing to multiple fields

We've seen this in gaming with the likes of Battlefield V, but it can also be applied to other areas like the automotive industry.

Unity Technologies has announced that it is working with Nvidia to offer early access for real-time ray tracing in the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) starting today, focusing on production and featuring an optimised preview solution in the second half of this year.

This is achieved with the help of Nvidia's RTX platform, and will help with design, engineering, marketing, and other areas. If you didn't know, this technology helps reproduce the physical properties of light for immersive experiences, the likes of which we've seen in Battlefield V already when it comes to gaming.

"As part of our commitment to best-in-class visual fidelity graphics, we rolled out the preview of the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) last year - a highly-optimized, state-of-the-art raster-based solution capable of achieving stunning graphics in real-time on consumer hardware. We built HDRP with the future in mind and today we're excited to announce that we are working with Nvidia to adopt its RTX real-time ray tracing capabilities so we could bring this technology to all," said Natalya Tatarchuk, Vice President of Graphics at Unity Technologies. "Real-time ray tracing moves real-time graphics significantly closer to realism, opening the gates to global rendering effects never before possible in the real-time domain."

Unity and Nvidia collaborated with BMW to showcase the 2019 BMW 8 Series Coupe in a demo called 'Reality vs Illusion: Unity Real-time Ray Tracing', letting users explore the real version and a virtual version to show the similarities they can achieve.

In terms of other uses outside of gaming, this of course means marketing and videos, as you can tell from the BMW experiment. In engineering and design though, ray tracing lets users recreate real materials and lighting scenarios to show design flaws like reflections or blind spots in cars.

"Until Nvidia RTX, real-time ray tracing was perpetually on the horizon. Now millions of developers working in Unity can achieve amazing graphics with lightning speed," said Bob Pette, Vice President of Professional Visualisation at Nvidia. "Unity's plug-and-play resources for developers and popularity with brands large and small make its users a natural audience to take advantage of RTX ray tracing capabilities."

Do you think ray tracing could prove useful in these fields?