Are your eyes widening a lot more when you play video games?
Well, that could be because of a new technique spreading slowly across the gaming arena of today. The most spectacular visual graphics of today’s video games are created courtesy of ray tracing, something which has become possible very recently with specialized hardware.
Although ray tracing is commonly associated with PC gaming, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X and Sony’s Playstation 5 also have the required setup and many games that support it.
In this article, we will look at Ray Tracing a little more closely.
The Basics of Ray Tracing
The Ray Tracing technique very efficiently illuminates a computer-generated scene. It is not a new concept; the new part is the computing muscle that can pull such a thing off and with such efficiency.
Just think of how a ray of light shooting at an object bounces off the surface like putting on a flashlight in a dark room. Now, if you shoot many rays and some of them return and some don’t how would the scene look?
The rays failing to return would likely be blocked by an object and it will create a shadow.
This is the fundamental explanation of how ray tracing parallels real-world lighting: the light reaching your eyes tell your brain about what you are seeing. This ray tracing has been used by animated films for decades now. An example could be Toy Story that came into the forefront in 1995.
Since then the film industry has been using the ray-tracing technique.
The Fundamentals Of Ray Tracing
Since it is based on shooting rays of light, Ray tracing is applied in a more general way than the other technique that is used in games, Rasterization.
Hence, the techniques to achieve the visual results are very much dependent on how those rays of light are used. For instance, the softer shadows and reflections need more rays to shot, whereas the blurry and motion effects might need altering timings of the rays or an altering of their point of origin.
Mainstream Gaming, Meet Ray Tracing
Ray tracing technique’s started out in the mainstream gaming arena in the year 2018 with the launch of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX desktop card line.
It took such a long time for ray tracing to enter the big game market as it was impossible to make it available at prices that were attainable in the mainstream gaming arena. Today, the beginning video card capable of Ray Tracing is the GeForce RTX 600, launched in 2019 which also comes at a relatively high price of around $349.
Visual Improvements With Ray Tracing
It is very important that you realize that Ray Tracing has only just entered the gaming graphics scene because even today rendering the complete game in real-time Ray Tracing is beyond the capabilities of the hardware. The games using the Ray Tracing technique do so only for certain effects and mainly those related to shadows and lighting.
Let’s see how the ray-tracing technique can visually improve a game. Here are screenshot pairs took on Shadow of the Tomb Raider for PC, supporting Ray-Traced shadows on the Nvidia GeForce RTX graphic cards. Just keep noticing the shadows falling on the ground.
Rasterized shadows
Ray-traced shadows (using the Ultra in-game setting)
Another pair of scenes from Shadow of the Tomb Raider...
Rasterized shadows
Ray-traced shadows (now coming with the Ultra in-game setting)
And let's look at a final set...
Rasterized shadows
Ray-traced shadows (Ultra in-game setting)
The shadows produced by Ray Tracing are softer and more realistic as compared to the rasterized shadows. The rasterized graphics do not really look bad, but yes the difference is pretty evident.
Ray Tracing: The Performance Impact
With PC graphics you cannot get anything without a price and the Ray Tracing visual goodies are no exception to this. Using it results in a performance penalty differing from game to game.
The performance trade-off comes by just applying the shadow and lighting effects, thus showing us how far away we really are from using the Ray Tracing technology fully.
But yes, developers will undoubtedly learn to optimize the game a lot better, as they have with Rasterization. So in the future, it might be possible to get more of the Ray-Traced effects on the games even out of the current hardware.
A Ray-Traced Future: Slowly Gaining Steam.
Even if the applications of Ray Tracing on the games today is minimal, there is no doubt that it is here for the long run. AMD followed by Nvidia, by introducing Radeon graphic cards with the hardware that supports Ray Tracing, has just confirmed this fact. This was followed by hardware Ray Tracing support in the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 which make the point even more concrete.
So there is no imperative to investing in graphics card supporting hardware Ray Tracing, not unless you think better graphics aren’t worth the money.
