About a year ago, during the Graphics Technology Conference (GTC) keynote, NVIDIA CEO and founder Jensen Huang showcased the stunning Marbles RTX Demo, described as a fully physically simulated game level powered by ray tracing and made in NVIDIA's Omniverse real-time simulation and collaboration platform.
Now that Omniverse is available in Open Beta, the Marbles RTX Demo was also added to that launcher as an app, as reported yesterday by DSOGaming. That means you can give it a spin for yourself, though beware that it originally ran on a Quadro RTX 8000, which is not far from the performance of an RTX 3080 graphics card.
Do let us know in the comments about your experience with the Marbles RTX Demo!
Simulation in Omniverse is provided by a collection of NVIDIA technologies as plug-ins or microservices to Omniverse Kit.
One of the first simulation tools to be distributed as part of Omniverse is NVIDIA’s open-source physical simulator PhysX, widely used in computer games. The objects that participate in the simulation, their properties, any constraints, and any solver parameters are specified in a custom USD schema. Kit provides features for editing the simulation set-up, starting and stopping it, and adjusting all the parameters.
Omniverse physics currently includes Rigid Body Dynamics, Destruction and Fracture, Vehicle Dynamics and Fluid Dynamics (Flow). Flow is an Eulerian fluid simulation for smoke/fire, leveraging a sparse voxel grid for unbounded simulation domain.
Omniverse supports renderers compliant with Pixar’s Hydra architecture, one of which is the new Omniverse RTX viewport which exploits hardware RT cores in Turing and future-generation NVIDIA architectures to do real-time hardware-accelerated ray tracing and path-tracing.
The renderer does not rasterize before ray-tracing, which allows for very large scenes to be handled in real-time. It has two modes: traditional ray tracing for fast performance and path tracing for the highest quality results.
Omniverse RTX natively supports multiple GPUs in a single system and will soon support interactive rendering across multiple systems.
