Overview#

The NVIDIA Omniverse RTX™ Renderer is a scalable photo-real renderer leading the convergence of real-time and offline rendering to simulate the world.

  • Built for NVIDIA RTX GPUs on standards such as USD and NVIDIA Material Definition Language, for the Windows and Linux operating systems

  • Pushes the limits of RTX rendering with a combination of AI, Multi-GPU, and the Cloud

  • Supporting various sectors such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, architecture, engineering, construction, design, manufacturing, scientific visualization, media and entertainment

It has one common core of features and two render modes for different target-uses, RTX - Real-Time and RTX - Interactive (Path Tracing), both solving the rendering equation with a path tracing-based algorithm.

Common Features

Multi-GPU Rendering

The Omniverse RTX Renderer supports multi-GPU rendering for single and multi-view, with automatic load-balancing and near-linear speedup for each frame, on a single system with up to 16 GPUs.

Multi-GPU render settings are available for both RTX - Real-Time and RTX – Interactive (Path Tracing) modes.

For more details, see:

Materials

The Omniverse RTX Renderer supports rendering physically-based materials such as:

Light Types

The Omniverse RTX Renderer supports rendering thousands of dynamic lights of a variety of types with no light baking, such as:

Geometry types

Cameras

Post-Processing

Volume Rendering

Geometry and Texture Streaming

The Omniverse RTX Renderer supports automated GPU resources management such as geometry and texture streaming, which enables high-quality rendering in real-time even for large datasets.

See the GPU Resources Management section for more details.

Debug Views

Debug Views are available for various debugging needs, such as:

  • Path Tracing passes for AOVs, Multi Matte, Adaptive Sampling error

  • Heat Maps to correlate colors to per-pixel measurements such as GPU timing spent as well as Any Hit and Intersection shader invocation count

See the Debug Views section for more details.

RTX - Real-Time mode Features

The Omniverse RTX Renderer provides the RTX - Real-Time ray tracing mode which allows rendering more geometry than traditional rasterization methods as well as physically-based materials at a high fidelity, in real-time.

In this mode, the renderer performs a series of separate passes that compute the different lighting contributions (for example: ray-traced ambient occlusion, direct lighting with ray-traced shadows, ray-traced indirect diffuse global illumination, ray-traced reflections, ray-traced translucency and subsurface scattering). Each pass is separately denoised, and the results are composited.

This mode is slightly less accurate than RTX – Interactive (Path Tracing) mode, due to using various shading approximations and optimizations to maintain a high framerate.

See the RTX - Real-Time mode section for more details.

RTX – Interactive (Path Tracing) mode Features

The Omniverse RTX Renderer provides the RTX – Interactive (Path Tracing) mode. In this mode, a single path tracing pass is used every frame to incrementally sample the lighting contributions from all possible lighting interactions in the scene. This is followed by a single de-noising step using the NVIDIA OptiX™ AI-Accelerated Denoiser. Post-Processing effects such as bloom and tone mapping are applied after de-noising.

The RTX – Interactive (Path Tracing) mode is the most accurate Omniverse RTX Renderer rendering mode and can produce photo-quality images, at the expense of lower framerate than RTX - Real-Time mode.

See the RTX – Interactive (Path Tracing) mode section for more details.

Feature Support

Some Omniverse RTX Renderer features are only supported under certain conditions. Here is a table listing those features’ support:

GPU Architecture

Compute Cability

DLSS Ray Reconstruction

DLSS Frame Generation

OptiX Denoiser

Shader Execution Reordering

Opacity Micro-Map

Motion BVH

Hopper

9.0

NO

NO

YES

NO

NO

NO

Ada Lovelace

8.9

YES

YES

YES

YES (DX12)

YES

YES (Vulkan)

Ampere

8.6

YES

NO

YES

NO

NO

YES (Vulkan)

Ampere

8.0

NO

NO

YES

NO

NO

YES (Vulkan)

Turing

7.5

YES

NO

YES

NO

NO

NO

Note

Older GPU architectures such as Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Tesla and Volta are unsupported by the Omniverse RTX Renderer. To learn more about Compute Capability, see: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus