NVIDIA just dropped some serious news about how they’re making Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™ game even more awesome. They’re using something called Shader Execution Reordering (SER) to boost performance on their GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs. According to NVIDIA’s developer blog, this move is all about ramping up the game’s graphics and speed to give players a top-notch experience.
Improvements with Shader Execution Reordering
So, what exactly is this Shader Execution Reordering (SER) doing for the game? Well, it’s cutting down the GPU time for the main path-tracing pass, TraceMain, by a whopping 24%. That’s a pretty big deal. By shuffling around threads in RayGen shaders, SER is making sure that the GPU is working smarter, not harder. This means better performance and more efficient use of those active threads per warp. And who doesn’t love a more efficient GPU, right?
Optimization Techniques in Action
NVIDIA didn’t just stop at SER – they went all out with optimizations to make sure everything runs like a well-oiled machine. By using the NVIDIA Nsight Graphics GPU Trace Profiler, they were able to pinpoint where things were getting stuck. Turns out, the RayGen shader had a bunch of ray-tracing live-state bytes clogging things up. By slimming down variable sizes and getting rid of unnecessary GLSL variables, they were able to get things moving more smoothly. Oh, and they also switched some floating-point variables to half-precision (FP16) to save on space without sacrificing quality. The result? GPU time dropping from 4.08 ms to 3.08 ms. Now that’s what I call progress!
Looking Ahead
This whole SER optimization thing is just the beginning. NVIDIA is already looking into more ways to make path tracing even better. They’re talking about Opacity Micro-Maps and compacting dynamic BLASs to amp up performance in scenes with alpha-tested materials. It’s all part of their mission to push the limits of real-time graphics rendering. So, get ready for even more mind-blowing visuals in your favorite games.
In the end, NVIDIA’s use of Shader Execution Reordering in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™ is a game-changer for path tracing. It’s all about giving players a gaming experience that’s more immersive and visually stunning than ever before. And with NVIDIA leading the way in graphics optimization, who knows what other cool tricks they have up their sleeves? Time to buckle up and get ready for the next level of gaming awesomeness!
