Ray Tracing: A Revolution In Video Gaming Industry

Simply said, it’s a method that will make lights in video games behave the same way they do in real life. Ray Tracing is one of the topics that the gaming world is talking about the most at the moment of the announcement. With the changes to the games, it was crucial for the corporation to promote them to the public.

How does it work?

It functions by mimicking genuine light rays and tracing their journey using a mathematical method. Moreover, it also acts in the same way that a beam of light would in the real world. With the use of this method, game designers can show how light beams in the game appear to leap off of objects, cast realistic shadows, and produce realistic-looking reflections.

This, for your information, was created by Albrecht Dürer in 1969, it’s not a brand-new invention. In fact, scientists have been developing technology to simulate realistic lighting and shadows in the film industry for years now. However, the technology wasn’t up to par, and it still needs a lot of work.

According to Nvidia’s Vice President of Technical Marketing, Tony Tamasi, a game must compute each frame in 16 milliseconds to run at 60 or 120 frames per second.

“Whereas a typical film frame is pre-rendered, and they can take eight, twelve, or twenty-four hours to render a single frame,” he continued.

At Gamescom 2018, the vice president made the news; even then, it has been a topic of conversation.

The enthusiasm for ray tracing is also lovely. Modern graphics processors power the newest gaming laptops and video game consoles. They have the rendering power to create real-time ray-traced scenes. So, consider that if all of this occurs, the earth’s tectonic plates will undoubtedly move.

When is it coming?

The arrival date is a major concern.

Ray tracing is kind of already here. You can surely use it if you have a PC that can handle it. Additionally, you can find it many modern games, such as –

• Minecraft
• Fortnite
• Battlefield V
• Metro Exodus
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Besides, it will be playable in upcoming games like Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Cyberpunk 2077.

Nvidia gave us access to ray-tracing technology last year when they unveiled their RTX graphics cards and Nvidia GTX 16 Series line. Therefore, in order for your PC to fully benefit from the technology, you would need one of these. Also, the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 lack the necessary hardware to support them.

Not to mention that the upcoming generation of gaming consoles will also feature ray tracing for those of us who cannot afford the graphic card. It contains the PlayStation 5 and Project Scarlett, Microsoft’s cryptically titled Xbox One replacement.

Tamasi explains, “It’s a new tool in the toolkit.”

“We must learn how to use that new tool effectively. There will be a completely new category of techniques created by humans.”

What’s different about it?

Currently, the way light functions in video games may make it appear as though all the necessary components are there.

• Reflections
• Shadows
• Bloom
• Lens flare

But it’s all very difficult. The light effects can be pre-rendered by the game developers. However, these are set up for the scene that is actually needed. Just a collection of animations that consistently displayed the same thing. These effects often appear quite nice to you, but they are not dynamic in nature.

The issue with that, according to Tamasi, is that it is entirely static.

“The lighting is just going to be terrible unless you render in real-time.”

The illumination in the scene won’t change if the player modifies it. For example, shooting a hole through a wall unless the makers have specifically accounted for that possibility. On the other hand, real-time ray tracing would enable automatic light changes.

How is ray tracing implemented?

✔️ Light in real life

Let us first explain how light functions in the real world. Basically, light enters your eyes, allowing you to see everything around you. These waves are composed of innumerable tiny particles that we refer to as photons. They emerge from a light source, travel over and through various surfaces, and eventually slam you in the face with them. Finally, your brain assembles all of these various light rays into a single, coherent image.

✔️ Light in Ray Tracing

We will now discuss Ray tracing. Except that everything flows typically in the other direction, it operates in a manner that is remarkably similar. The ray-traced light in the software starts at the viewer and goes outward, plotting a path over various objects, occasionally even assuming their color and reflective qualities. Then the relevant light source that might have an impact on that specific ray is then determined by the software. Besides, this method of mimicking vision in reverse is far easier for a computer to manage than attempting to trace the light source’s rays.

Finally, only light paths within the user’s field of view need rendering. Displaying what is in front of you does not take any more processing power than rendering all of the light rays in a scene.

Developer’s perspective on this

In an interview, Christensen from the NCSA said, “every second, trillions or billions of photons enter your eye.”

There’s a lot of optimization, efficiency, and hacking to make something look realistic. That’s considerably more than the number of computations a computer can do per second.

So, they look for something else instead of trying to find every single beam of light. However, Nvidia’s developers have found the solution by tracing only a few of the most significant beams. Denoising is the process of using machine learning algorithms to fill in the gaps and smooth things out.

Added Tamasi, “we’ll actually shoot a few or perhaps a few dozen rays per pixel rather than hundreds or thousands.”

In reference to denoising, he added, “In order to build the final image, we use multiple classes of denoisers.”

Conclusion

You could feel excited just thinking about it, but it will still be a while before this technology becomes commonplace. Real-time ray tracing is still developing and has shown to be somewhat unpredictable. Additionally, designers and developers will need to stay up as hardware advances to create exciting new products. In conclusion, you will need to wait for a little longer before being able to play completely ray-traced games.