Apollo 11: NVIDIA recreates historic Moon landing
What's the story
As the world continues to celebrate the 50th anniversary of humanity's first step on the moon, conspiracy theorists still claim that Apollo 11 landing never happened.
Now, nearly five years after debunking those claims with a high-quality recreation of the Moon landing, hardware giant NVIDIA has made that demonstration even more realistic.
Let's take a look.
Demo
Moon-landing enhanced with NVIDIA real-time ray tracing
The folks at NVIDIA transformed the Moon-landing depiction into a "beautiful, near-cinematic" experience using their latest GPU tech, RTX real-time ray tracing.
They modeled sunlight in real-time and tracked how it actually interacted at the time of Moon-landing to add accurate shadows, visor, reflections, surface illumination, and other tiny light-related details into the scene.
Simply put, it gave the whole rendition an uncanny realism.
Creation
How these effects were created
NVIDIA created this rendition using the power of its RTX-equipped GeForce and Quadro chipsets.
Its team first studied the Eagle lander, the reflectivity of astronauts' suits, and the properties of lunar dust and terrain.
Then, using real-time ray tracing, they scraped the Sun's position during the landing and modeled how its light would have reflected from different surfaces in real-time.
Quote
Here's what NVIDIA said about the tech
"With RTX, 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," NVIDIA said while detailing ray-tracing.
Debunking
This also debunks conspiracy theorists
NVIDIA's wizardry not only gives a glimpse at what only 12 people in the history of mankind have experienced but also offers further evidence to debunk conspiracy theorists who claim Moon-landing was fake.
They have claimed that the lighting shown in landing images isn't possible, but ray-tracing, by modeling the Sun's movement and showcasing how its rays affect overall illumination, proves otherwise.