[non-Blender] Reflections on Real Time Ray Tracing
Jamesy writes:
The recent demos of real time ray tracing have been creating quite a stir lately, particularly with Eevee looming to shake up Blender’s render engine lineup not to mention the game industry to boot. But as our article points out, real time ray tracing has been rolled out before, by nVidia and intel to name just a couple of companies to show case demos boasting real time rays.
What has been perhaps a little bit overlooked is that the hardware powering these demos has been, well, a little affordable for the average punter which raises questions as to when the mere mortal may be able to harness real time ray tracing.
Click here for the full article, hopefully it helps you set realistic expectations of what’s possible :D
A long time ago behind the uncanny valley far, far away…
… there lived a little sprite named roderick.
Real time raytracing is a thing. Right now. It’s in a game you can buy and play — on a console. SquareEnix’s Luminous engine uses a technique called ray bundle tracing in Final Fantasy 15, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. It runs fine on my laptop too. I believe the new Doom also shipped with a form of raytracing, they used a different more popular technique called voxel cone tracing. And THAT one runs on Switch, which is pretty much a glorified tablet. The Godot engine also impliments a very limited form of voxel raytracing too, I believe they populate their global illumination volumes with it.
Previously Nvidia rolled out VXGi (A voxel cone tracing api) which was really promising, but ultimately didn’t catch on because of concern about console performance issues. There’s still a VXGi integration fork of UE4 floating around somewhere you can play with I believe, and a few mid-sized indie games actually did ship with it, though I forget their names since I never bothered to buy them. That was ~5 years ago now, and as Doom proved, the technology has advanced by leaps and bounds.
Real time raytracing is very much a thing, and it has been for awhile now. The real hype around this is that Nvidia is rolling out dedicated raytracing hardware, and that could be really cool. I am still partial to SquareEnix’s implimentation of bundle tracing though, it’s a very clever and efficient solution, and I’m not sure this will out perform it.