Ray Tracing and Why You Love to See It!

[Pemalite]

Peh said:

Pemalite said:

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.

Since when did consoles rendered scenes with Raytracing in realtime?

For decades.

Conker: Live and Reloaded had a single bounce light which is... You guessed it. Ray Tracing.
https://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/cs/Education/EDAN35/lectures/Stefanov10-gi-in-games-notes.pdf

Doom 1993 actually used Ray Casting for it's lighting model... Which you guessed it. Is a Ray Tracing Algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting

So not only have you been privileged to enjoy Ray Tracing in video games for the better part of almost 30 years, but you didn't even know it.

Ray Tracing isn't a *singular* thing, it's actually a name for a group of different algorithms, with varying degrees of complexity and thus computational requirements...

As we gain more computing resources... Ray Tracing in turn has gotten more complex to the point where it's become necessary to offload it to dedicated hardware processing cores.
Rasterization will for all intents and purposes still underpin all 3D rendering for years to come, just like it always has.

Hynad said:

Returnal is used exactly in that manner, to accelerate global illumination queries, essentially speeding up a software-based system  and is also used to take the 3D audio to the next level: audio environment queries are accelerated with hardware ray tracing support. 

And please, don’t be dishonest and disingenuous about how and when Ray-Tracing actually became something viable for real-time game visuals and sounds. 

I'm aware Returnal uses it in that manner, I have it on PS5 and it looks the goods. Although visually the game falls short in a few other areas, but lighting and particles are certainly not an issue.

And I am far from being disingenuous, the evidence is just above this quoted reply. Read it and weep.