You may recall that approximately five years ago, Nvidia showed off its latest lighting tech (at the time) by recreating the Apollo 11 moon landing. The video was meant to help debunk moon landing conspiracy theorists who claimed some of the lighting in images from the landing was not possible. Obviously, it was.
Well, it’s 2019 now – the 50th anniversary of our trip to the moon – so Nvidia has of course now applied RTX technology to an updated version of the demo. In Nvidia’s own words:
With RTX, each pixel on the screen is generated by tracing, in real time, the path of a beam of light backwards into the camera (your viewing point), picking up details from the objects it interacts.
That allows artists to instantaneously see accurate reflections, soft shadows, global illumination and other visual phenomena.
They even showed the tech off to Buzz Aldrin himself.
The advantages are obvious – RTX means that the artists didn’t need to replicate every reflection accurately and wait for a server farm to render the scene. They could simply recreate the light source (also known as the sun) and the object’s light will reflect on, and let the RTX tech do the magic in real-time. You could move the sun in and see how it affects illumination on the astronauts and moon lander on-the-fly – allowing for further debunking of conspiracy theorists.
You can watch it for yourself here:
The only disappointing thing about all of this is that Nvidia didn’t provide a downloadable demo for people to try out themselves. You better pony up, Nvidia, or else wackjobs are going to call this moon landing fake too.
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