Porsche, Nvidia And Epic Games Team Up To Render Porsche 911 Speedster Concept

Porsche has joined forces with Nvidia, as well as video game developer Epic Games in order to unveil ‘Speed of Light’, which is a video presentation featuring a Porsche 911 Speedster Concept, rendered via real-time ray-tracing software.

The presentation took place earlier this week at the SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver, Canada, relying on Nvidia’s Turing architecture and new Unreal Engine rendering advancements.

“The Porsche 911 Speedster Concept is the first car to be visualized with interactive real-time ray tracing,” stated Epic Games HMI exec, Francois Antoine. “In concert with Nvidia we’re accelerating the adoption of real-time ray tracing across many industries.”

Meanwhile, Porsche’s Virtual Design manager, Christian Braun, stated that his company’s collaborating with Epic Games and Nvidia has so far exceeded all expectations “from both a creative and technological perspective.”

“The Achieved results are proof that real-time technology is revolutionizing how we design and market our vehicles,” added Braun.

This experimental real time ray tracing technology will be built into a future Unreal Engine 4 release that’s meant to benefit the entire development community.

“When you see the quality of the cinematic, it’s remarkable to note that no baking or lightmaps were required. There is no precomputed lighting – it’s all fully dynamic for both objects and light,” concluded Antoine.

“When we’re designing cars, we have to explore every option from every angle, and having the ability to review fully visualized renders in real time has completely transformed the way we ideate.”

‘The Speed of Light’ demo ran on two Nvidia Quadro RTX graphics cards during its debut, while newly demonstrated Unreal Engine features included ray-traced translucency, ray-traced rectangular area light shadows, ray-traced reflections, ray-traced diffuse global illumination and dynamic textured area lights.