What Is Ray Tracing
Ray Tracing has the ability to be one of the biggest technical advancements in graphical processing that we have seen in years.
At its most basic level, Ray-Tracing is a rendering technique that allows the GPU to display lighting in games in a much more realistic manner.
The process of Ray Tracing uses in-game physics to bounce light off of objects to create life-like shadows and reflections.
While we have seen plenty of realistic lighting over the years, what makes Ray-Tracing different is its ability to take that lighting and bounce it off of objects in the game, casting real-time, life-like shadows and reflections in the scene.
A great example of Ray Tracing is seen below in a video from NVIDIA, who is at the forefront of getting this technology into the hands of consumers with their RTX series of graphics cards that released earlier this year.
Although we have seen amazing lighting techniques in games for quite some time, Ray Tracing is able to bring a new life to lighting engines and give a higher sense of realism and immersion to the player through this technique.
Although support for Ray Tracing is still in its infancy when it comes to games, the feature is slowly being implemented across the board to give us a glimpse into what next-gen games will look like.
