NVIDIA Releases Displacement Micro-Map (DMM) Toolkit
NVIDIA released a new Displacement Micro-Map Toolkit online, providing developers with libraries, samples, and tools to create and view displaced micromeshes.
The toolkit, which is still in a work-in-progress state and will likely be improved over time, only covers displacements as a separate SDK exists for opacity. You can head over to GitHub to download the toolkit and learn more about it. There are currently no games that support DMM, at least that we know of; hopefully, the release of this toolkit will be a step toward improving the technology's adoption among game developers.
NVIDIA talked at length about Displaced Micro-Meshes (DMM) at length during a behind-closed-doors presentation held back in September 2022, where the company highlighted new technology on the Ada Lovelace architecture, which optimizes ray tracing performance. DMM, which are supported by both Simplygon and Adobe tools, utilizes third-generation RT cores capable of understanding and processing an optimized BVH (bounding volume hierarchy). Opacity Micro-Maps also make it easier for RT cores to understand how rays affect objects with opacity masks, including predetermined opacity states like opaque, translucent, or unknown, allowing for significant performance boosts.
Ada Lovelace is the current architecture that powers the NVIDIA RTX 4000 series. Following the release of the RTX 4090, 4080, and 4070 Ti, NVIDIA is gearing up for the release of the RTX 4070, which is reportedly launching next month on April 13th. While many have been waiting for this card to release for an affordable NVIDIA current generation GPU, the rumored starting price of $749 suggests that it will be some more time until such an option will be available.
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