Will EEVEE be able to do real time ray tracing?

Question

I heard about NVIDIA's announcement about real-time ray tracing - I want to know, will Blender support this in the future? That is, will you be able to see things real-time ray traced (that is to say, get pretty close to getting photo-realistic renderings) in the view port with EEVEE if you have a Titan V card?

I don't really know much about Blender, but I wanna know this - might encourage me to learn it :)

The star wars example you've seen is rendered with an experimental, pretty expensive (priceless) 200.000$+ gpu card rig. It will take another 3-5 years making that accessible to the market. — brockmann, Apr 21 '18 at 16:58
You can do real-time ray tracing in the viewport already, if you have enough GPU power to run cycles that quickly. — gandalf3, Apr 21 '18 at 18:02
...and how much GPU power is that, gandalf3? :) (...as specified in number of Titan V cards needed....?) — Groovy Geezer, Apr 23 '18 at 14:30
I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is speculation about hypothetical features — Duarte Farrajota Ramos, Oct 12 '18 at 19:23

Amir · Answer 1 · 2018-10-13T03:40:27.713

Not in a soon future. NVIDIA's GTX 20 series cards have the ability to do some real-time ray tracing but it's not enough for doing seamless rendering for any scene with high FPS (frames per second). Although, as mentioned here people can use these new graphics cards for renderings using EEVEE or Cycles but Blender is not able to take the advantage of the ray-tracing capabilities of these cards. However, based on some discussions I've had with Blender developers I know that they are considering using NVIDIA's APIs such as OptiX in the future. OptiX is backed by some advancements in AI that allows extremely fast denoising/approximation of ray-traced scenes with only 1 or 2 ray bounces instead of couple of hundreds or more. This way, you can get to pretty high FPSes (e.g. 60 or more) without the need to perfectly track rays for many bounces in the scene. Keep in mind that this is the first series of GPUs being able to perform many ray-tracing operations per second. This will only get better in the future with newer GPUs that will be capable of doing orders of magnitude more ray-tracing operations so that you won't need to do that much of approximation for the final scene rendering.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 13 '18 at 09:25

2

As far as I know, EEVEE will be real time, but won't ray-trace. I've already seen some awesome looking renders made with EEVEE, so it still has potential on photo-realistic side.

edited Oct 13 '18 at 09:25

dr. Sybren

7,139
1
23
52

answered Apr 21 '18 at 16:38

Linguini

917
1
11
29

4

The output will never be "photo-realistic". It's still an approximation based on the disney's principled paper in OpenGL, basically the same what modern game engines or substance trying to achieve. To get something photo-realistic, there is cycles. – brockmann Apr 21 '18 at 17:08
1

True, but Eevee can still do alright considering it's faking all of it. – Linguini Apr 21 '18 at 17:57
5

@brockmann well to be honest, Cycles is also approximating physics :) There are renderers much more photoreal, like Maxwell. – Jaroslav Jerryno Novotny Apr 22 '18 at 08:56
3

Yeah of course, but that wasn't my point @JaroslavJerrynoNovotny – brockmann Apr 22 '18 at 14:37

Will EEVEE be able to do real time ray tracing?

2 Answers2