Ray tracing has long been the holy grail of graphics rendering technology. Since it was announced back in Gamescom 2018, NVIDIA Turing has been the talk of the town. From there, you could have this technology through NVIDIA’s RTX lineup.

Ray tracing has actually been around for long back before 2018 though. Movies and TV shows have been using it to create amazing CG which entertained us with incredible and real-life like visuals. What NVIDIA has produced (and soon, AMD as well) is Real-time Ray tracing. Ray tracing requires a lot of horsepower, which simply wasn’t a trait the predecessors of NVIDIA RTX lineup. Now, we can render the same effects in everyday computers and as a result, we now have ray tracing games.

So, what is ray tracing?

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that can produce incredibly realistic lighting effects. An algorithm can trace the path of light and simulate the way the light interacts with the virtual objects it hits in the computer generated world.

The lighting effects in games have been becoming more and more realistic over the years. But, the benefits of ray tracing are much more about how it interacts with the world rather than the light itself.

Ray tracing improves translucence and scattering along with lifelike shadows and reflections. Where the light hits is taken into account by the algorithm and it calculates the interaction and interplay much like the human eye would process real light, reflections and shadows.

With enough computational power at your disposal, it is possible to produce astonishingly realistic computer generated environments that are indistinguishable from real life. But, that has been the problem: most gaming PCs only has so much GPU power to work with, let alone a modern gaming console.

Ray tracing have been in use for movies and TV shows because studios have had the capital and capability to harness the power from a server farm or cloud computing to get the job done. But still, it might take long hours to get the results. Previously, doing it all on the fly has been far too taxing for existing hardwares.

Video games have used rasterization, traditionally. It is a faster way to render computer graphics. It converts 3D graphics into 2D pixels to display on the screen, but requires shaders to depict realistic lighting. But the shift has now started and more and more games have now started to take advantage of the latest hardware that now NVIDIA seemingly has a monopoly over, to use the real time ray tracing.

Even after nearly two years since it has been introduced to the market, the results, if I may are not super mind-blowing. But it is getting better by time. The revolution in the gaming industry has already started.

With AMD’s ray tracing graphics around the corner and the resulting competition, one can only hope, that it brings advancements in ray tracing in an exponential rate.

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