NVIDIA's RTX 4000 Series Graphics Cards Could Bring Another Huge Boost to Ray-Tracing

gamerant.com:

It's hardly a secret that almost all of Nvidia'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 by Nvidia suggests 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 that RTX 4000 could have 70% more CUDA cores than 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