DX11 real-time ray-tracing

[HappySqurriel]

zarx said:

Navane said:
Wow, that really is amazing looking. It's great that ray-tracing is able to be achieved liked this on a small scale, but I doubt they'd be able to do something like this on a large scale with AI, physics, and what have you. I think that feasible ray-tracing is still somewhat out there to be used in a realistic setting without impacting perform too much.

Well the tech demo does seem to have physics lol, but yea a full game with real-time ray-tracing is probably a ~5 years away at this point. The fully realtime global illumination in UE4 will be a nice stepping stone/stopgap while we wait. 

Yeah ... 5ish years away seems about right ...

With the number of objects in a scene kept relatively small, and with the scene partitioned in such a way that you can reduce the number of object-ray intersection tests, ray-tracing can be done in real-time with very impressive results. In theory we probably could build hardware today that could produce populated environments that we expect from modern games while using real-time ray-tracing, but I would expect that to take a multi-processor graphical workstation with multiple high end graphics cards; and in 5 to 8 years that kind of processing power will be readily available in consumer level PCs and video game consoles.