Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 12, 2016. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
An overview of the new GameWorks rendering technologies for shadow and lighting effects and physical simulation algorithms (still in beta):
Nvidia Volumetric Lighting: A lighting technology that simulates the scattering behaviour of light in the atmosphere or air. First presented in the game Fallout 4.
Nvidia Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows (HFTS): Creates realistic shadows for smooth transitions from hard to soft cast shadows. HFTS debuted in Ubisoft’s new title Tom Clancy’s The Division.
Nvidia Voxel Accelerated Ambient Occlusion (VXAO): An algorithm for realistic ambient occlusion in real time. VXAO calculates the shading of the entire geometric game scene, including places that are not visible to the camera – for a realistic representation with more depth. VXAO was used for the first time in Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Nvidia Flow (Beta): The computational fluid dynamics algorithm simulates and renders flows such as fire and the smoke of flammable liquids.
Nvidia is making the source code for selected GameWorks libraries available to developers via GitHub. Source code for Nvidia Volumetric Lighting and Nvidia’s FaceWorks demo is already available. The source code for Nvidia HairWorks, Nvidia HBAO+ and Nvidia WaveWork will follow soon.
More information at developer.nvidia.com
