Quantum computing could unlock 190% leap in ray tracing performance

Researchers publish new whitepaper where quantum computing super-boosts performance on ray tracing workloads, by up to 190%.

Published May 25, 2022 10:08 AM CDT   |   Updated Wed, Jul 27 2022 3:51 AM CDT
0 minutes & 56 seconds read time

We all know that turning ray tracing on radically reduces performance, so any help in the performance department is not only welcomed, it's begged for.

Quantum computing could unlock 190% leap in ray tracing performance 01

A team of researchers from the UK, US, and Portugal have suggested that there's some huge untapped performance using a hybrid of classical ray tracing algorithms with quantum computing. Ray tracing workloads that were boosted by up to 190% by quantum computing.

How? By limiting the amount of computations needed by each individual ray. The researchers demonstrated this by rendering a small, 128x128 ray traced image in three approaches: classical rendering, non-optimized quantum rendering, and optimized quantum rendering.

  • Classical rendering: 2,678 million ray intersections (64 per ray)
  • Unoptimized quantum rendering: 1,366 million ray intersections (33.6 per ray)
  • Optimized quantum rendering: 896 thousand intersections (22.1 per ray)

All of the fluff aside, this isn't going to help you with your ray tracing performance in games. No one has a quantum computer at home, and even if you did... it's not like it's going to be some ray tracing add-in card that acts like a PhysX accelerator.

NVIDIA already has RT cores on the GPU, but I don't think we'll see a quantum computer on the GPU any time soon. Or maybe we will, hey Jensen?

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Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering.

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