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Chaos Group has debuted its new real-time ray tracing technology, Project Lavina, rendering at up to 90 frames per second on the new Nvidia Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs.
Project Lavina, named after the Bulgarian word for avalanche, was unveiled with a demo depicting a massive 3D forest and several architectural visualisations running at 24-30 frames per second (FPS) in standard HD resolution.
Rather than using game engine shortcuts like rasterised graphics and reduced levels of detail, each scene features live ray tracing for interactive photorealism.
Unlike a traditional game engine which requires assets to be rebuilt and specially optimised, Lavina simplifies this process with direct compatibility and translation of V-Ray assets.
Upon loading the scene, the user can explore the environment exactly as they would in a game engine, and experience physically accurate lighting, reflections and global illumination.
Chaos Group advises that Lavina is able to handle massive scenes at real-time speeds – reportedly over 300 billion triangles in one case – without any loss in detail.
“We’ve been developing ray tracing technology for 20 years, and this is one of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve ever made,” said Vlado Koylazov, co-founder and CTO at Chaos Group.
“Real-time and ray tracing coming together is the beginning of something big.”
This is Chaos Group’s second real-time announcement in the last year, following the beta release of V-Ray for Unreal, with the company stating that soon users will be able to apply the most realistic style of rendering to every type of interactive project, including 3D configurators, virtual productions and VR, using the toolset they prefer.
“This breakthrough was made possible by partnering with NVIDIA, whose Quadro RTX GPUs helped unlock the next level of real-time experiences,” said Chaos Group CEO Peter Mitev. “From here, Project Lavina’s mission will be to focus on pushing the quality and speed of real-time ray tracing.”
New Nvidia Quadro ‘Turing’ GPUs
The ‘greatest leap’ since its invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Nvidia says that its Turing GPUs will feature new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and new Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible.
Click here to read more about the new Nvidia Quadro ‘Turing’ GPUs that are arriving Q4 2018
