NVidia Celebrate Apollo 11's Mission by Pushing GPU's One Step Further

Bryce

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Nvidia has recently recreated the Apollo 11 landing with real-time ray tracing.

It recently was the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing and Nvidia is showing off their ray tracing using their current GPU technology just for the Anniversary, using the RTX real-time ray tracing, which was the topic of the day at GTC conference.

Nvidia used its latest tech to make big improvements to the Moon-landing Demo that they created five years ago and refined last year to demonstrate their new GPU architecture. The resulting simulation is a fully interactive demo that shows real time sunlight and providing a cinematic and realistic depiction of the moon landing complete with accurate shadows on the visors, metal surfaces and much much more.

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Nvidia managed to get Buzz Aldrin to do commentary, discussing how it reminds him on what it was like to ascend and then descend the stairs from the lunar module to the surface.

Little known fact - the blurry, black and white video footage of Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon now on frequent replays on TV is actually a third-generation copy. The video signal beamed down to Earth came in a 10 frames-per-second format which was incompatible with TV, so NASA converted it to the right format which reduced quality and the saved on tapes.

When Nvidia began constructing the virtual environment, they studied the lander, the reflections of the astronaut's space suits and the properties of the Moon's surface dust and terrain. With the real-time ray tracing, they can scrub the sun's relative position back and forth and also has every surface reflecting the light the way it actually would.

Nvidia have put a lot of work into this simulation, which demonstrates quite how far technology has come since the launch 50 years ago.

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