NVIDIA Apollo 11 Moon Landing Tech Demo now supports full real-time ray tracing and looks gorgeous

Last year, NVIDIA revealed an amazing version of Apollo 11 Moon Landing Tech Demo, showcasing some newly implemented ray tracing effects. However, the green team has decided to enhance that earlier moon-landing tech demo with new RTX real-time ray tracing technology, and shared some new screenshots from it.

According to NVIDIA, in the new tech demo – and thanks to the RTX tech – each pixel on the screen is generated by tracing, in real time, the path of a beam of light backwards into the camera (your viewing point), picking up details from the objects it interacts. With real-time ray tracing, NVIDIA was able to recreate how the sun’s rays, coming from behind the lander, bounced off the moon’s surface, how these rays interacted with the lunar lander to cast eerie lunar shadows, and even how the light bouncing from the lander and the moon’s surface interacted with the astronaut’s puffy space suits.

Now I’m pretty sure we won’t get games looking like these in the next couple of years. Next-gen consoles will release at the later quarter of 2020, and even though we can at least expect a visual jump for most next-gen titles, I don’t expect them to look this good. But anyway, as said NVIDIA has also released some screenshots to showcase this new RTX version of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing Tech Demo so go ahead and take a look at them!