2020 promises to be a big year for ray tracing. The Xbox Series X and PS5 promise to support the function: and while it seems like a technical concept, ray tracing has dramatic implications for how gamers will see game environments going into the future.
PC players have had access to live ray tracing for a few years, and games like Minecraft and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare have used it to great effect — making shadows and light come alive. It’s a graphically intense process — and requires a hefty amount of power to pull off. But without getting lost in the details, here are ten key facts about ray tracing, and how it’s set to revolutionize the gaming world.
10 What Is It?
Ray Tracing is a way to render graphics — a way to make what you see in the game world appear more realistic.
And it relies on shadows. Specifically, ray tracing tech tracks every single light source from within the game world — like the sun for example, and then lights all the objects within gamers field of vision accordingly. Sounds simple right?
9 How Does It Work?
But that’s the thing: ray tracing requires a hefty amount of computing power. Using an algorithm, the computer card defines how the light source would interact with the surfaces it bounces off. that allows for more realistic shadows and reflections too. In a perfect world, ray tracing could make games appear as lifelike as real life — but since there’s limits to computing power, that’s a far off dream.
Calculating the way light responds to different surfaces — especially curving ones — takes a lot of power.
8 Ray Tracing Has Been Around For A While
It’s nothing new, exactly. Ray tracing has been around since the late 1970s. But as computers developed, the ability to introduce ray tracing to various projects get more and more realistic. At that time, scenes with ray tracing took so long to render it was unthinkable they could ever be used for video game design.
7 It’s Powering CGI
Gamers have seen ray tracing before — many times. In the latest Star Wars movies ray tracing is what gives many of the scenes, which are almost entirely computer-generated their realistic shine.
And many other studios are adapting to the tech too. Pixar used ray tracing in Monster University, and the Iron Man trilogy rendered Tony’s flying suit with eye-popping realism: but each of those scenes take hours of rendering time.
6 It’s Given PCs An Advantage
Since real-time ray tracing requires so much power — to render light as the gamer moves around the world — it’s been limited to PC players. Many older games, like Grand Theft Auto, have been rendered with ray tracing: with impressive results.
Xbox One And PS4 simply don’t have optimized hardware to handle that kind of CPU intensive software (but that’s coming soon). Low-end PCs render ray traced graphics...but make the game slow down so much it looks like a slide show.
5 It’s Been Monopolized
And there’s one company that holds (almost) all the cards: NVIDIA. The graphics company developed the NVIDIA GeForce RTX, the graphics card best suited to port ray tracing into popular titles like Minecraft or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. There’s quite a few PC titles that support the feature — making many console gamers more than a bit jealous.
But AMD, another graphics card creator, has plans for ray tracing enabled cards which could be the key to unlocking the feature for more users — and console players.
4 Console Games Have Caught On
Many of the titles that support ray tracing are available on Console. But.. there’s a graphical difference.
Right now, the PS4 and Xbox One don’t have the hardware or software to run games with ray tracing integration. Instead they use rasterization to give a general approximation of how light would look within the game world, without sacrificing computing speed. Many upcoming games are being developed with ray tracing in mind.
3 Combines With Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine, a pillar of game design, will include a bunch of ways to enhance graphics using ray tracing. That’s the software that many top games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. When combined with the ability to implement ray tracing, Unreal Engine promises to lead the way for other game design software programs to combine ray tracing capabilities with world building tools (but the programs already been reconfigured to keep up with evolving tech).
2 Reflection Advantage
And ray tracing isn’t just a graphics upgrade. It could give gamers a leg up in online play or single-player scenarios.
Realistic shadows could enhance gamer’s ability to see in dark environments, and reflections promise to add a new element to stealth encounters and suspenseful set pieces. A more realistic game world provides better ways to use the environment to your advantage.
1 It Could Define Future Console Wars
Both PS5 and Xbox Series X are set to include graphics cards that can run ray tracing enabled games. The year’s biggest releases, like Cyberpunk 2077, will be released on the next generation on consoles with Ray Tracing capabilities. But it’s how Sony and Microsoft implement ray tracing along with other key features, like frame rate capabilities, which could define their success.
Ray tracing only pops as much as the game that’s using it does. It remains to be seen which console will have the best tech to support ray tracing on the best games. But either way, ray tracing is here to stay. And it’s almost certainly set to define the future of gaming.