How Real-Time Ray Tracing Works

Today we will try to explain how real-time ray tracing works in games, and estimate what prospects this technology has.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that calculates refractions and reflections of rays, correct interaction of light with any surfaces including specular ones, puddles for example. As a result of this process, we get a photorealistic graphics.

Ray tracing has been used in film production for a long time. One of the earliest examples is a “Tron” filmed in 1982.

But unlike game developers, filmmakers do not need to calculate light source behavior in real time. That is the reason why the technology has not been used until 2018.

The first company that introduced ray tracing support for mass products was NVIDIA. These are the RTX 2060, 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti graphic cards. The cheapest of them is RTX 2060 ($ 350).

NVIDIA RTX series has special RT-cores intended only for calculations related to ray tracing. RT-cores are not removed from mobile versions of the graphics cards.

Microsoft has released DirectX Raytracing API for DirectX 12, and AMD — for API Vulkan. AMD, alas, has so no answer to team Green and it still only explores the possibilities of breakthrough technology.

The main issues of ray tracing in games are that there is almost no games supporting ray tracing and a significant performance reduction.

For now ray tracing is only supported by Battlefield V. Upcoming games with ray tracing support are the following: Control, Metro: Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Serious Sam 4.

As for Russian games, developers of Atomic Heart and Enlisted have announced Ray tracing support. Moreover, Atomic Heart will also get DLSS anti-aliasing.

Unity experts believe that the ray tracing boom in games is possible no earlier than 2020. So do not rush to buy expensive hardware you can play games on ultra-settings even on your PC. And that’s how to do it:

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