NVIDIA announces Ansel RTX for creating high quality ray-traced in-game photos

NVIDIA's new RTX GPUs are not just about ray tracing and AI goodness in games but they also help in creating high quality ray-traced in-game photos thanks to Ansel RTX. In ray tracing supported games, Ansel RT increases the extent of ray tracing beyond real time levels when the game is paused so as to create a high quality ray-traced in-game photo. NVIDIA shows the example of invoking Ansel RT in Assetto Corsa Competizione, which results in 10x the number of refractions per pixel, 12x Ambient Occlusion samples, 32x shadow samples, and 40x reflection samples. Rendering that many rays in real time is highly computational intensive and not possible with current hardware but should work fine for stills, which is what NVIDIA is trying to market here.

Of course, developers need to integrate Ansel SDK features in their games to get all the ray tracing goodness but NVIDIA says Super Resolution in-game photos complete with HDR and filters should be possible in just about any other game running on the new GeForce RTX cards. Ansel RTX also leverages Turing's Tensor cores to apply AI-assisted resolution scaling so that in-game shots can be saved up to 8K resolution. In other words, it is Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) applied to in-game photos.

Alongside Ansel, NVIDIA is also introducing new Freestyle filters that allow customizing in-game photos. These filters will be released in the upcoming Game Ready driver. The extent of Ansel RTX-powered effects will vary depending on whether the game uses the Ansel SDK or not. NVIDIA says there are about 50+ games that will be implementing the SDK, which gives exclusive features such as Ansel RT, 360/VR screenshot, and Free Camera. Another 150+ games do not currently implement the SDK but they too can reap benefits from Ansel as they get HDR, filters, and AI-assisted Super Resolution for in-game photos.

The benefits of the new NVIDIA RTX GPUs will be gradually realized over time as more games and GPU-dependent applications take advantage of the new capabilities. Possibly, there might be even more cool software features that NVIDIA would reveal in due course.

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