What is Ray Tracing and why is it important for next-generation devices?

If you're following the evolution of graphics cards on your PC and news of the next generation of home gaming consoles, you've certainly heard a lot about Ray Tracing. This feature is not entirely new but has become even more available with NVIDIA RTX graphics cards and many huge titles to come such as Cyberpunk 2077, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Dying Light 2 will support this technology and even some already released games like Control and Wolfenstein: Youngblood It supported beam tracking in different ways and uses.

Nvidia is the largest company trying to push this new technology to the center, especially at this year's Gemscom exhibition, where it reviewed many huge titles and also showed us a trial version of Minecraft using beam tracking where we saw the light coming from the treetops and holes in the walls of the caves and we saw the shine of gold And diamonds in front of torches and transparent and reflective water. It's the same old Minecraft game but the addition of real-time ray tracking technology has greatly increased its beauty, below you can see what I'm talking about.

You may be wondering why you talked about Minecraft technology in spite of newer and bigger titles. With Nvidia behind him, ray tracing is the “next big thing” in the graphics world such as technologies that have emerged from previous generations such as bump mapping, anti-aliasing and ambient occlusion. Beam tracking is the word that tells you that the next generation will be more elegant and shiny than the previous generation.

Microsoft and Sony have already revealed that the Xbox Scarlet and PlayStation 5 will support this technology, and even AMD has made it clear that it will support them by engineering their cards for the next generation. But the most important question remains:

What is Ray Tracing?

Beam Tracking is a technique that simulates how light actually works in the real world and transforms it in the same way with games via graphics cards. Light rays begin from the light source and then travel through space and become absorbed, diffused, refracted, or reflected by different objects along their path. By calculating light rays from their source and how they interact with different objects in the scene or the digital world, we can reflect how they work in the real world and get better illumination and more accurate shadows.

Technically, ray tracking works on computers in a different way where the path from the camera to the light source is tracked only for efficiency and performance. This technique needs powerful hardware and this method reduces the pressure on your system and device.

For beam tracking to work properly, developers must identify different surfaces of digital objects because light reacts differently when it comes into contact with wood, metal, or glass. The water is transparent and reflective so you should not only be able to see it, but the reflections should also be according to your location and point of view. All this needs to be properly defined within the digital world for the technology to work.

Film and television visual effects have long used this technology, but require a lot of time or a lot of energy. Rendering a scene using X-ray tracking requires hours, days or weeks of work or requires the use of large and shared servers. X-ray tracking technology is just a complex mathematics, it contains a lot of complex processes. Instead of ray tracing, games generally used another technique called rasterization, which takes 3D models and turns them into pixels to display. Each pixel has a specific color based on the same model, and developers use programmable shading to determine the final color of the pixel. Dotting is closer to guessing than simulation.

What's new is that we are finally able to track real-time radiation in devices. NVIDIA RTX cards are still primarily based on rasterization, but also contain GPU cores specifically developed for ray tracing calculations. In addition, Nvidia designed libraries to track their own beams to ease the load on developers. It does not fully do what the visual effects of film and television do, but it has become a step closer.

Why is this technique important?

As I mentioned earlier, the use of real-time ray tracking provides us with more realistic lighting and better reflections and shadows on the surfaces of different objects without the developers having to program each light, surface and pixel individually. Even in some of the biggest mega titles, activating real-time ray tracking will not significantly change the level of graphics, but it will add a lot of detail and make the experience more realistic.

How the developers use ray tracing is ultimately up to them. Some games like Metro: Exodus use ray tracing to illuminate their world, providing more precise illumination, while Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses this technology for more accurate shadows and Battlefield 5 relies heavily on reflections. Newer titles such as Control use ray tracing for many different things including shadows, lighting, and reflections. For developers, this means being able to create more realistic scenes with fewer resources.

Ron Frulich, a 3D designer at Hunt: Showdown:

We can place large mirror-like surfaces at the stage without worrying about whether the scene will change to the extent that it will seem to belong to this place. We can also place moving objects through mirrors and we know that animations will be accurately reflected in these mirrors. This means we do not worry about whether these reflections will not match the world, giving us the opportunity to make the world more vibrant.

Ben Arshard, the Metro Exodus conversion programmer, told RPS last year that:

Ray Tracing does not completely change the way games are developed. It's a side thing that fits them very well and that's why it's great - it's pretty easy to take your current data and present it in another way

This technique does not rely solely on lighting because the sound spreads in the middle in a very similar way and similar calculations can be used to create more realistic lighting and sounds. PlayStation 4 engineer Mark Cerny and the next generation have also used X-ray tracking technology. “If you want to do tests to see if a player can hear certain sound sources or if enemies can hear a player's footsteps, beam tracking is useful,” said Cerny. It's the same thing as taking rays from the ocean and the environment. ”

Nvidia has pushed this technology forward and the biggest reason was to outperform its rival AMD, but the industry is now heading in the same direction and supports this technology with all the new titles. Epic Games has revealed that its popular Unreal Engine 4 will support real-time beam tracking technology during GDC 2019. Unity Technologies has also launched a trial version that supports this technology for its engine and we have also seen a great demo of CryEngine that shows us real-time beam tracking technology, You can see it below but this technology has not yet been launched on the engine.

So we can simply say that the gaming industry is heading this way, and like all the graphical techniques that have already impressed us and are now commonplace, ray tracing will be a part you may not notice in games in the near future as you explore the worlds. The digital world looks bright and more elegant with this technology and with all those rays.

Once again watch the above-mentioned presentation of ray tracing in Minecraft and how it made it great even though it was ten years old as I mentioned earlier. Now imagine what real-time ray tracing can do for games like Uncharted and Resident Evil? Well this is often going to be in the next generation.