It’s hardly a secret that almost all ofNvidia’s cutting-edge research and development is going into ray-traced rendering and its potential applications for contemporary and future computer-generated graphics. With rumors aplenty about the company’s next generation of RT-focused graphics cards, it’s almost a given that RTX 4000 GPUs will potentially offer the most powerful ray-tracing hardware on the market.
In fact, a recent patent listing submitted byNvidiasuggests that the company is looking at non-standard applications of ray-traced rendering, too. The filing references a potential auto-exposure application that could result in a more natural and accurate image through the use of virtual light meters.
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The patent filing references a new way of handling auto-exposure and light levels in regard to context-sensitive content. By using dedicated ray-tracing cores to implement virtual light meters, Nvidia could sample incidental lighting conditions and adjust the exposure levels to an appropriate level, so that the given scene remains visually appealing even if it’s overly bright or dark by default. While this may sound like a waste of RT-ready hardware that could otherwise go towards improved reflections and such, rumors do suggest thatRTX 4000 could have 70% more CUDA coresthan top-end RTX 3000 GPUs, making ray-traced auto-exposure a potentially trivial rendering technique in regard to performance.
The specific examples provided as part of Nvidia’s ray-traced auto-exposure patent include wide-sweeping camera shots that may include extremely bright backgrounds or items, which may potentially lead to image detail loss due to the hardware’s inability to render the scene properly. Using RT hardware for exposure modifications on the fly should, however, resolve this problem and massively improve the final image quality. This particular use-case may be just one of the upcoming ray-tracing inventions asNvidia spends billions to secure RTX 4000 components, and is presumably hoping to entice new buyers with exciting visual improvements.
While there’s virtually no information available about the next generation of Nvidia’s ray-tracing hardware, it seems likely that theRTX 4000 series may be launching in September, regardless of current GPU shortages. Of course, the submission of a patent that references ray-traced auto-exposure doesn’t mean that the technique will be implemented anytime soon, or that it would be limited to the latest generation of RTX graphics cards.
It’s also worth pointing out thatNvidia was recently hackedby a group known as “Lapsus$,” the members of which began leaking Nvidia’s confidential information shortly thereafter. There’s no telling if auto-exposure patents were included in leaked data, but it also wouldn’t be particularly surprising if Nvidia was to submit more RT-specific patents in the near future, even if there are no immediate plans to make use of them. Ray-traced auto-exposure, then, may still be in its earliest stages of production at this point.
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