NVIDIA, Adobe to Bring Interactive, Photo-Real Ray Tracing to Millions of Graphic Designers

NIVIDIA RTX Powers Advanced Adobe Dimension Renderer Tech Preview at Adobe MAX.

Oil and canvas. Thunder and lightning. Salt and pepper. Some things just go together — like Adobe Dimension CC and NVIDIA RTX ray tracing, which are poised to revolutionize the work of graphic designers and artists.

Adobe Dimension CC makes it easy for graphic designers to create high-quality, photorealistic 3D images, whether for package design, scene visualizations or abstract art. And Adobe Research is constantly innovating to make it even easier for designers to create faster and better.

The latest find: NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing technology, which promises to make photo-real 3D design interactive and intuitive, with over 10x faster performance for Adobe Dimension on NVIDIA RTX GPUs.

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What used to cost tens of thousands of dollars on ultra-high-end systems will be able to run on a desktop with an NVIDIA RTX GPU at a price within reach of millions of graphics designers. Check out a tech preview of this technology at Adobe MAX, in Los Angeles, in NVIDIA booth 717.

Adobe Dimension enables designers to incorporate 3D into their workflows, from packaging design to brand visualization to synthetic photography. Adobe makes 3D accessible by handling the heavy lifting of lighting and compositing with Adobe Sensei machine learning-based features, then producing a final, photorealistic output using the Dimension ray tracer.

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“We’re partnering with NVIDIA on RTX because of its significant potential to accelerate our two core pillars – ray tracing and machine learning,” said Ross McKegney, director of Engineering for Adobe Dimension CC. “Early results are very promising. Our prototype Dimension builds running on RTX are able to produce photorealistic renders in near real time.”

Reinventing Creative Workflows with Real-Time Ray Tracing and NVIDIA RTX

Ray tracing is the technique modern movies rely on to produce images that are indistinguishable from those captured by a camera. Think realistic reflections, refractions and shadows.

The easiest way to understand ray tracing is to look around you. The objects you’re seeing are illuminated by beams of light. Now turn that around and follow the path of those beams backwards from your eye to the objects that light interacts with. That’s ray tracing.

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Historically, though, computer hardware hasn’t been fast enough to use these 3D rendering techniques in real time. Artists have been limited to working with low-resolution proxies, slow design interaction and long waits to render the final production. But NVIDIA RTX changes the game.

NVIDIA has built ray-tracing acceleration into its Turing GPU architecture with accelerators called RT Cores.  These accelerators enable artists to smoothly interact with a full-screen view of their final image. Lighting changes appear in real time, so artists can quickly get just the look they need. Camera changes, including depth of field, happen in real time, so artists can frame shots perfectly just like they would in a real camera.

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