DirectX Raytracing

DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is a feature of Microsoft's DirectX that can do raytracing in real-time. It is a big development in computer graphics. It was first made to use Nvidia's Volta platform. Some of the first products for consumers that use DXR include the Nvidia GeForce 20 series of GPUs, which was announced in 2018. DXR came out as an extension to DirectX 12 instead of a new version of DirectX.

The Windows 10 October 2018 update includes the public release of DirectX Raytracing.

Technical details
DXR adds 4 main elements to the DirectX 12 API:
 An "acceleration structure", which is an object that holds what a 3D environment looks like. This allows objects that are in the scene to be quickly found by the GPU.
 A command list method called DispatchRays, which controls raytracing.
 HLSL shader types that are appropriate for raytracing.
 The Raytracing pipeline state, which is comparable to the existing Graphics and Compute pipeline states.

References

Other websites
 Microsoft developer blog on DirectX Raytracing
 DirectX Raytracing and the Windows 10 October 2018 Update
 Dev Preview of New DirectX 12 Features
 Nvidia blog about raytracing vs. rasterization

Category:Computer graphics