By Kane Fulton
Nvidia has updated its GameWorks software development kit with three new tools designed to help developers make games look more life-like than ever before.
If you’ve played games such as GTA V on newer Nvidia GPUs in recent years, you’ve no doubt noticed GameWorks-related graphics options such as Percentage Closer Soft Shadows (or PCSS) — used to render soft shadows — in settings menus.
Unveiled at GDC 2016, GameWorks SDK 3.1 introduces new rendering techniques for lighting and shadows. First used in Fallout 4, Volumetric Lighting simulates how light behaves as it scatters through their air.
In a conference call with journalists, Nvidia senior director of GameWorks Rev Lebaradian said that in the past, “Computer graphics generally ignored the matter that exists within air between the viewer and the various surfaces in the scene, assuming there’s a vacuum everywhere, ignoring the light scattering effect that’s within a volume.”
By using a multi-stage algorithm, he said that the technique helps developers, “Get closer to doing a more accurate simulation of what actually happens when light travels through a medium that has matter in it.”
In the shadows
The second new technique, Hybrid Frustrum Traced Shadows (HFTS), was introduced in The Division. It uses an …read more
Source:: techradar.com – Gaming
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