I was under the impression from the initial coverage that they were actually getting something like 1 to 2 rays per pixel per frame. Perhaps even less.
From there they were using some sort of smoothing and/or temporal anti-aliasing to gather the data from multiple frames to get decent quality out of it.
Or are you proposing how many raise they would NEED to be able to do real time full raytracing? By the time we have that ability I imagine everyone will just want the 4K version anyway and we will be behind again.
Either way what nVidia has shown looks great. It’s too bad I’ll have to wait years to be able to use it as a console gamer.
Due to noise and aliasing. If multiple features (edges, materials etc) cover a single pixel, you usually get aliasing. If you do random sampling (of reflections, lights, whatever) you get noise.
For anti-aliasing you'll usually want at least on the order of 10 rays per pixel for a nice result. If you do random sampling, you quickly need 100 to 1000 rays per pixel to get an acceptable noise level.
One ray represents many photons, and those photons scatter off in many different directions when they hit most surfaces. To get a reasonable picture of where they went, you need a lot of samples.
A single raycast also only gets you one step of the light's journey. That means, for example, that following light as it bounces from a light source, to a surface, to another surface to your eye requires at least 3 rays even for perfectly mirrored surfaces.
It depends on what you wan't to use ray tracing for.
If you want to calculate global illumination with path tracing (which is a form of ray tracing) then you need multiple samples per pixel to get a noiseless result.
It's a stochastic process and it needs many samples per bounce. Basically, unless the surfaces are perfect mirrors, each angle of reflection is a probability function. Look for Monte Carlo methods for more information.
For the secondary rays for reflection, refraction and shadows.
At one ray per pixel, you can only do the primary ray and find which triangle it hits. The exact same thing can be done with rasterization much faster and with equal results.
Looking at the demo video Nvidia released yesterday[1], it is pretty obvious that the performance is still bit limited. The shadows and reflections are distinctly low-resolution and I don't think its solid 60fps either.
Sure it's still pretty nice for first-gen product, so not complaining too much. But there is still fair bit of road to go on.
That should be enough to do full scene real-time raytracing with rays per pixel to spare (usually 10 rays per path are more than enough).