RTX - Common

Geometry

Misc

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Normal & Tangent Space Generation Mode

/rtx/hydra/TBNFrameMode

Int

0

Mode selection for vertex Normals and Tangents generation.
  • Auto (0): Selects the mode depending on available data and data update pattern.

  • CPU (1): Uses mikktspace to generate tangent basis on the CPU.

  • GPU (2): Allows normal and tangent basis update on the GPU to avoid the CPU overhead, such as for deforming meshes.

  • Force GPU (3): Forces GPU in any circumstances.

Back Face Culling

/rtx/hydra/faceCulling/enabled

Bool

False

Enables back face culling for ‘Single Sided’ primitives. This applies to UsdGeom prims set to ‘Single Sided’ since the Double Sided flag is ignored.

USD ST Main Texcoord as Default UV Set

/rtx/hydra/uvsets/stIsDefaultUvSet

Bool

True

If enabled, ST is considered to be the default UV set name.

Hide Geometry That Uses Opacity (debug)

/rtx/debug/onlyOpaqueRayFlags

Bool

False

Allows hiding all objects which have opacity enabled in their material.

Instance Selection

/rtx/hydra/instancePickingEnabled

Bool

True

Enables the picking of instances.

Renderer-internal Meters Per Unit

/rtx/scene/renderMeterPerUnit

Float

-1.0

Number of units per meter used by the renderer relative to the scene scale. Some materials depend on scene scale, such as subsurface scattering and volumetric shading.

Ray Offset

/rtx/raytracing/rayOffset

Float

0.0

Offset used to prevent ray-triangle self intersections.

Points Default Width

/persistent/rtx/hydra/points/defaultWidth

Float

1.0

Uses this value if width is not specified in UsdGeomPoints.

Wireframe

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

World Space Thickness

/rtx/wireframe/wireframeThicknessWorldSpace

Bool

True

Interprets the wireframe thickness value in world space instead of screen space.

Thickness

/rtx/wireframe/globalWireframeThicknessWorldSpace

Bool

False

Wireframe thickness in wireframe mode.

Subdivision

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Global Refinement Level

/rtx/hydra/subdivision/refinementLevel

Int

0

The refinement level for all primitives with Subdivision Schema not set to None. Each increment increases the mesh triangle count by a factor of 4.

Subdivision Feature-adaptive Refinement

/rtx/hydra/subdivision/adaptiveRefinement

Bool

False

Feature-adaptive refinement automatically increases or reduces refinement level based on geometric features. This reduces the number of polygons used in flat areas for example.

Curves

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Global Number of BVH Splits

/rtx/hydra/curves/splits

int

4

Higher number of splits results in faster rendering but longer BVH build time. The speed up depends on the geometry: long and thin curve segments tend to benefit from more splits. Memory used by the BVH grows linearly with the number of splits.

Materials

MDL

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Animation Time Override

/rtx/animationTime

Float

-1.0

Overrides the time value provided to MDL materials.

Animation Time Use Wallclock

/rtx/animationTimeUseWallclock

Bool

False

Use actual elapsed time for animation instead of simulated time.

Lighting

Light Visibility

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Show Area Lights in Primary rays

/rtx/raytracing/showLights

Int

0

Defines if area lights are visible or invisible in primary rays.
- Per-Light Enable (0): The light’s value is used.
- Force Enable (1): True for all lights regardless of their value.
- Force Disable (2): False for all lights regardless of their value.

Invisible Lights Roughness Threshold

/rtx/raytracing/invisLightRoughnessThreshold

Float

0.0

Defines the surface roughness treshold below which lights invisible in primary rays are also invisible in reflections and refractions.

Use First Distant Light & First Dome Light Only

/rtx/scenedb/skipMostLights

Bool

False

Disable all lights except the first distant light and first dome light.

Shadow Bias

/rtx/raytracing/shadowBias

Float

0.001

Offset applied for shadow ray origin along the surface normal. Reduces self-shadowing artifacts.

Dome Light

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Lighting Mode

/rtx/domeLight/upperLowerStrategy

Int

0

Select how to sample the Dome Light.
- Image-Based Lighting (0): Most accurate even for high-frequency Dome Light textures. Can introduce sampling artefacts in real-time mode.
- Approximated Image-Based Lighting (4): Fast and artefacts-free sampling in real-time mode but only works well with a low-frequency texture, for example a sky with no sun disc where the sun is instead a separate Distant Light. Requires enabling Direct Lighting denoiser.
- Limited Image-Based Lighting (3): Only sampled for reflection and refraction. Fastest, but least accurate. Good for cases where the Dome Light contributes less than other light sources.

Baking Resolution

/rtx/domeLight/baking/resolution

Int

4096

The baking resolution of the Dome Light texture when an MDL material is used as its image source.

Simple Fog

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Simple Fog

/rtx/fog/enabled

Bool

False

Enables the use of a simple and fast exponential fog approximation which only models some absorption, no light scattering.

Color

/rtx/fog/fogColor

Float3

0.75, 0.75, 0.75

The color or tint of the fog volume.

Intensity

/rtx/fog/fogColorIntensity

Float

1.0

The intensity of the fog effect.

Height-based Fog - Use +Z Axis

/rtx/fog/fogZup/enabled

Bool

False

Use positive Z axis for height-based fog. Otherwise use the positive Y axis.

Height-based Fog - Plane Height

/rtx/fog/fogStartHeight

Float

1.0

The starting height (in meters) for height-based fog.

Height Density

/rtx/fog/fogHeightDensity

Float

1.0

Density of the height-based fog. Higher values result in thicker fog.

Height Falloff

/rtx/fog/fogHeightFalloff

Float

1.0

Rate at which the height-based fog falls off.

Start Distance to Camera

/rtx/fog/fogStartDist

Float

0.0

Distance from the camera at which the fog begins.

End Distance to Camera

/rtx/fog/fogEndDist

Float

5000.0

Distance from the camera at which the fog achieves maximum density.

Distance Density

/rtx/fog/fogDistanceDensity

Float

1.0

The fog density at the End Distance.

Global Volumetric Effects

The global volumetric effects use a three-dimensional “voxel grid”, a camera aligned frustum divided into several depth slices parallel to the camera plane along the camera direction. These depth slices are themselves subdivided into a number of frustum shaped voxels along the width and height of the slice (the amount of voxels is controlled by the “Pixel Density”).

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Fog Height

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/atmosphereHeight

Float

1000.0

Height in world units (centimeters) at which the medium ends. Useful for atmospheres with distant lights or dome lights.

Fog Height Falloff

/rtx/pathtracing/ptvol/fogHeightFallOff

Float

10.0

Exponential decay of the fog above the Fog Height.

Maximum Inscattering Distance

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/maxDistance

Float

50000.0

Maximum depth in world units (centimeters) the voxel grid is allocated to. If set to 10,000 with 10 depth slices, each slice will span 1,000 units (assuming a slice distribution exponent of 1). Ideally this should be kept as low as possible without causing artifacts to make the most of the fixed number of depth slices.

Density Multiplier

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/densityMult

Float

1.0

Scales the fog density.

Transmittance Measurement Distance

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/transmittanceMeasurementDistance

Float

10000.0

Controls how far light can travel through fog. Lower values yield thicker fog.

Transmittance Color

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/transmittanceColor

Float3

0.5, 0.5, 0.5

Assuming a white light, it represents its tint after traveling a number of units through the volume as specified in Transmittance Measurement Distance.

Single Scattering Albedo

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/singleScatteringAlbedo

Float3

0.9, 0.9, 0.9

The ratio of scattered-light to attenuated-light for an interaction with the volume. Values closer to 1 indicate high scattering.

Anisotropy Factor (g)

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/anisotropyFactor

Float

0.0

Anisotropy of the volumetric phase function, or the degree of light scattering asymmetry. -1 is back-scattered, 0 is isotropic, 1 is forward-scattered.

Apply Density Noise

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/useDetailNoise

Bool

False

Enables modulating the density with a noise. Enabling this option can reduce performance.

  • World Scale

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/detailNoiseScale

Float

0.002

A scale multiplier for the noise. Smaller values produce more sparse noise.

  • Animation Speed X/Y/Z

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/noiseAnimationSpeed(X,Y,Z)

Float

0.0

The X/Y/Z vector for the noise shift when animated.

  • Scale Min/Max

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/noiseScaleRangeMin

Float

0.0

A range to map the noise values of each noise octave. Typically these should be 0 and 1, but to make sparse points in the noise less sparse a higher min can be used, or a lower max for dense points to be less dense.

  • Octave Count

/rtx/raytracing/inscattering/noiseNumOctaves

Int

4

A higher octave count results in greater noise detail, at the cost of performance.

Flow

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Flow

/rtx/flow/enabled

Bool

False

Enables simulation and rendering of Flow volumes.

Flow in Real-Time Ray Traced Shadows

/rtx/flow/rayTracedShadowsEnabled

Bool

False

Flow volumes in ray-traced shadows in real-time mode.

Flow in Real-Time Ray Traced Reflections

/rtx/flow/rayTracedReflectionsEnabled

Bool

False

Flow volumes in ray-traced reflections in real-time mode.

Flow in Real-Time Ray Traced Translucency

/rtx/flow/rayTracedTranslucencyEnabled

Bool

False

Flow volumes in ray-traced translucency in real-time mode.

Flow in Path-Traced Mode

/rtx/flow/pathTracingEnabled

Bool

False

Flow volumes in Path-Traced mode.

Flow in Path-Traced Mode Shadows

/rtx/flow/pathTracingShadowsEnabled

Bool

False

Flow volumes in shadows cast by light primitives in Path-Traced mode.

Composite with Flow Library renderer

/rtx/flow/compositeEnabled

Bool

True

Use Flow’s built-in renderer and composite the results instead of ray tracing through Flow volumes in the RTX renderer.

Use Flow Library Self Shadowing

/rtx/flow/useFlowLibrarySelfShadow

Bool

True

Enable the casting of shadows by the volume on to itself when using Flow’s built-in renderer.

Max Blocks

/rtx/flow/maxBlocks

Int

0

Maximum number of Flow volume blocks. To keep rendering performance high and memory consumption low, this number needs to be kept as small as possible, while also high enough to contain the entire volume.

Debug

Debug View

Debug Views are available for various purposes. Some are useful to identify potential areas of optimization in the scene’s content, for example heat maps to correlate frame time spent per pixel, or the number of invoked Intersection or Any Hit shaders per pixel.

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Render Target

/rtx/debugView/target

String

A list of all render passes which can be visualized.

Output Value Scaling

/rtx/debugView/scaling

Float

1.0

Scales the output value by this factor. Useful to accentuate differences.

Note

If RTX - Real-Time is the active render mode, set ‘NVIDIA DLSS Super-Resolution’ to DLAA for full viewport resolution in its render settings.

RTX - Interactive (Path-Tracing) Debug Views

Display Name

Description

PT Adaptive Sampling Error

Allows visualizing the normalized standard deviation of the Monte Carlo estimator of the pixels: warm colors represent high variance, which indicate that additional samples would lead to improved convergence for those pixels.

PT Denoised Result

Final render output, after denoising.

PT Noisy Result

Final render output, before denoising.

PT AOVs

See AOV render settings and Multimatte render settings for more details about each AOV and how to enable them for preview.

Heat Maps Debug Views

_images/common_debug_view_heatmap.jpg

Heat Maps correlate colors from a color gradient to per-pixel measurements from a rendering pass which is useful for debugging and for profiling. The warmer the color, the higher the value it represents.

Display Name

Description

Timing Heat Map

Measures the amount of frame time spent on a pixel.

Any Hit Heat Map

Any Hit shaders are invoked when ray intersections are not opaque, which can incur a high performance cost. This heat map counts how many Any Hit shaders were invoked in a pixel for the selected pass. It is often used to find materials that have unwarranted use of translucency.

Intersection Heat Map

Custom Intersection shaders are invoked when rays intersect with curves. This heat map counts how many custom Intersection shaders were invoked in a pixel for the selected pass.

Pass

Selects a pass to measure.

Maximum Time (microseconds) / Any Hit / Intersection

The color palette is remaped between 0 and the maximum value.

Color Palette

Different color palettes can be selected for viewing convenience.

Show Color Bar

Toggles the display of the Color Bar in the viewport.

Materials

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Disable Material Loading

/app/renderer/skipMaterialLoading

Bool

False

Scenes will be loaded without materials. This can lower scene loading time.

Texture Streaming Settings

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Texture Streaming

/rtx-transient/resourcemanager/enableTextureStreaming

Bool

True

Enables texture streaming which allows to load textures at a resolution which meets the view’s needs. This reduces memory usage and load times. Toggling the setting requires reloading the scene for it to be applied.

Texture Streaming Memory Budget (fraction of GPU memory)

/rtx-transient/resourcemanager/texturestreaming/memoryBudget

Float

0.6

Limits memory budget used for texture streaming.

Texture Streaming Budget Per Request (in MB)

/rtx-transient/resourcemanager/texturestreaming/streamingBudgetMB

Int

200

Maximum budget per streaming request. 0 = unlimited but could lead to stalling during streaming.

Texture Compression Settings

Display Name

Setting Name

Value Type

Default Value

Description

Compression Quality

/rtx-transient/materialdb/blockCompression/quality

Int

0

Fastest: 0, Normal: 1, Production: 2, Highest: 3

Compression Size Threshold

/rtx-transient/resourcemanager/compressionMipSizeThreshold

Int

7

Max Resolution

/rtx-transient/resourcemanager/maxMipCount

Int

16

Textures larger than this will be downsampled to this resolution. 7 = 64, 8 = 128, 9 = 256, 10 = 512, 11 = 1024, 12 = 2048, 13 = 4096, 14 = 8192, 15 = 16384, 16 = 32768

Normal Map Mip-Map Generation

/rtx-transient/resourcemanager/genMipsForNormalMaps

Bool

True

Enables mip-map generation for normal maps to reduce memory usage at the expense of quality. Toggling the setting requires reloading the scene for it to be applied.