Ray Tracing and Why You Love to See It!

[Pemalite]

Peh said:

zippy said:

Industry buzzword to hype the new consoles.

Every word in this sentence is wrong except "to" and "the". 

He's not wrong.

It -is- an industry buzzword to hype new hardware (not just consoles).

Ray Tracing has been around for decades, Generation 6 consoles had games that used Ray Tracing.

It's not new. It's not novel.

Spindel said:

Hynad said:

Both are not mutually exclusive.

While RT could be used as an gameplay element just as physics can I see less of an use for it that couldn't be done with "cheating" meaning no need to have actual real time RT. 

From a game play perspective I see more to gain from real time CFD than real time RT to be honest. 

But I might just lack imagination. 

At the moment developers are using " Dedicated Hardware" Ray Tracing to "Bolt on" effects to current games (I.E. Shadows and Reflections) rather than using it to hardware accelerate operations... Once developers start using it to hardware accelerate say... Global illumination for example we can then spend more shader processing to bolster visual fidelity elsewhere.

At the moment, the few games that tend to use Ray Tracing don't necessarily look significantly/generational better, but rather simply look different... Until you start nit-picking finer details like screen-space reflections and its inherent visual artifacts... But let's be honest, in a fast-paced first person shooter, you aren't going to notice the visual flaws in screen spaced reflections vs ray tracing if screen-spaced reflections are of acceptable quality.