The release of Nvidia's turing architecture based cards have pretty much helped initiate bringing Ray Tracing to the mainstream gaming market. We also know by now that the next generation of gaming consoles from Sony (PS5) and Microsoft (Xbox Scarlett) apart from being able to support 8k gaming will also support hardware level ray tracing. Thus with Ray Tracing being the current talk of the tech town what exactly is it ?
Video games for a very long time until today have been dependent on the same fundamental method of rendering every image/frame by a process called rasterization, which essentially is the process of converting 3 dimensional objects into 2 dimensional images pixel by pixel with textures , depth, light etc. on your monitor/television screen which essentially is a 2-d plane. Here the reflections, shadows and refraction of light is only based on what is contained within a particular scene .
Ray Tracing is basically a change in this fundamental method. In this process the rays from the virtual eye/camera is passed through an individual pixel to an object in the game environment and the ray then bounces off and reaches all the light sources around. The object then reacts in accordance to its characteristic properties and either reflects, refracts or casts shadows and unlike rasterization it takes the whole world into consideration for the various lighting effects. This is a huge leap as all this happens in real time and games are going to look much more realistic than they are at the moment as ray tracing helps simulate real world lighting effects.
Until recently ray tracing was used only for non real time processing such as CGI in movies. This required a lot a computing power and could thus only be done by very powerful computers. It was thus done offline in render farms but even then certain frames could take as long as a day to complete rendering hence restricting it's usage to just the movie industry.
You may then get a question as to how then is it possible for ray tracing to happen in video games using consumer level graphic cards. Well consumer level ray tracing is a hybrid of rasterization and ray tracing. Since ray tracing requires a lot of computational power it is not possible at the moment to completely render games in terms of ray tracing, hence only the objects/light sources that have the most impact on the game world will be rendered my means of it while the rest will be taken care of by rasterization which again quite capable of rendering high quality graphics.
At the moment the games that support ray tracing are only a handful - Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus. Although these games support the technology each of them support them in various variations. Battlefield V supports uses ray tracing for real time reflections whereas Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses it for shadows while Metro uses it for global illumination thus making it very computational power intensive. The computing prowess required is based on what video game uses ray tracing for. Consumer grade graphics cards now have specific hardware (Nvidia - RT cores, Tensor cores) to accelerate ray tracing support which helps make it much more efficient.
Although ray tracing is brand new in the market and only a handful of games support it at the moment the use of the technology is only going to rise with upcoming titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Wolfenstein: Young Blood already confirming their implementation of the technology.
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