Yes I've heard about the wonders of making future video games using Ray Tracing over Rasterization but do you think this technology will also come to consoles or will this only be the future of PC gaming?

Which is why I'm irked whenever I see the tech being limited because of that focus. I see what's going on with Star Citizen, that makes me wish all kinds of devs were doing something like the guys at RSI.

Yeah that's what I worry about a little. That it may not come to consoles or if it does it will be only later. I've heard that ray tracing based game rendering is extremely heavy on processors so yeah I guess PC is the prime target.

I was hoping that with consoles getting more powerful over time (One can expect the PS5 to be a monster according to some rumors) that this would simultaneously come to both worlds but who knows. Oh well it's not like rasterized games are unplayable or ugly anyway, you can tell when you see Shadow of the Colossus or God of War but still I wonder about these new technologies...

On the other hand and upon reflection if they use these new techniques to render games for PC's they must be certain that ALL PC's can play those games right? That means High end PC's, mid range PC's and low end PC's, right? So if a low end PC can play games made with Ray Tracing rendering, what's to technically stop a future PS5 that will have a power that goes somewhere between mid range and high end PC's, to benefit from this rendering? I'm just speculating here but my "logic" radar tells me there is no good reason for this new stuff to not hit consoles... hopefully

On the negative side, I hope too much realism doesn't kill the game-like aspect of video games. I don't wish to feel like I'm playing a movie with faces so realistic that it would feel like moving an actual person around, like in the Matrix movies. Strong colors à la Pixar are ideal in RPG/Adventure games in my opinion.

These pictures made me realize something very lacking about this supposed look into "next gen" and it's ray tracing ...

Photogrammetry is the graphical technology of yesterday since there are already games that already put it to use in production. Next gen IMO should be about physically based global illumination such as using monte carlo methods to provide realistic lighting phenomena ...

Hopefully, consoles will provide hardware accelerated features for ray tracing so we can get there and stop having to ever fool with lightmaps or god forbid even shadow maps ... (would be nice if we could also render volumetric effects with global illumination and have physically simulated translucency)

And no more BRDFs (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Functions), just BSDFs (Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Functions) ... (light isn't just reflected, it also gets transmitted through materials such as glass or other materials that exhibit refraction and in some cases light scatters in participating medium such as smoke or soap or any material that exhibit subsurface scattering) 

Remember that thread i linked he was talking about it 2007