NVIDIA Recreates Apollo 11 Moon Landing with RTX Tech

NVIDIA sat down with legendary astronaut Buzz Aldrin to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Aldrin is part of that mission and is the second man to walk on the moon. The glory of the first steps being mission commander Neil Armstrong’s. This time NVIDIA and Aldrin pour over the original grainy, low-res footage and re-create it in high-definition ray-traced glory. Using the latest NVIDIA hardware of course.

For someone who is 89 years old, Buzz Aldrin sure looks pretty spry. It is also great to hear his commentary on top of NVIDIA’s updated footage. You can watch this video below:

Where Can I Download This NVIDIA RTX Demo?

The original demo is originally for showing off Maxwell GPUs several years ago. You can still find it via this link. Hopefully, along with the new version that takes advantage of RTX ray-tracing technology soon. For now, it is not available for download yet.

According to NVIDIA each pixel on the screen is generated by tracing the path of a beam of light backwards into the camera (the user’s viewing point), picking up details from the objects it interacts. All in real time. That allows artists to instantaneously see accurate reflections, soft shadows, global illumination and other visual phenomena.

NVIDIA adds that prior to RTX technology, only special effects rendering farms working for hours or even days on a single scene in a movie could manage this level of realism.