Nvidia abandoned GTX and turned to RTX to highlight the importance of ray tracing. AMD and Intel have also added ray tracing to their graphics cards. You can even use it on the latest Playstation and Xbox. Ray tracing also allows you to buy One of the impetus for the new graphics card. Is ray tracing any different with the countless technologies that have unfolded in front of my door in the past few years? Is it the future of gaming graphics, or just another marketing gimmick?
Playing games without ray tracing (ray tracing) is less blind, so what is it?
Ray Tracing: A Way to Make Games More Realistic Lighting
In short, ray tracing is a method of accurately rendering lighting in 3D and is considered the best way to create more realistic lighting effects such as shadows and reflections. When comparing ray tracing to 4K, VR, or AI, you might be thinking “so what” when good lighting can already be achieved using traditional 3D rendering techniques like rasterization. Still, ray tracing is a new means of bringing more realism to 3D graphics, and in that sense it’s the same as 4K.
A simple explanation of ray tracing, which calculates real lighting by doing the same thing as the human eye but in reverse. For humans, light from the sun or a light bulb either goes directly into the eye, or bounces off other objects until it reaches the eye, and the brain processes all this information. In ray tracing, the camera emits light rays, and when they hit an object, they travel to any associated light sources; if the light hits another object on the way to the light source, shadows are created.
Image credit: Henrik/Wikipedia
In 2018, when Nvidia first announced the RTX 20 series, the term “ray tracing” entered the collective consciousness of the gaming community, and the product was also the first gaming GPU to support light tracing. However, Nvidia didn’t invent ray tracing, nor did it develop graphics cards to enable it. Ray tracing has been around for decades, and movies like Monster House and Cars were rendered using ray tracing. Nvidia’s ray-tracing achievement has been to develop hardware that is very good at handling ray tracing and can render in real time faster than in the past. Nvidia calls this achievement the “holy grail of graphics.”
Expected effects of ray tracing in games
While ray tracing isn’t just for gaming, it’s an important feature of the latest GPUs, so here we’ll focus on how ray tracing affects the gaming experience. Because we all like to play games with a frame rate of at least 30FPS, ray tracing has never been noticed before the RTX 20 series, and the first games to receive ray tracing support were “Tomb Raider: Shadow” and “Tomb Raider” in 2018. Games like Battlefield V, but not all games implement all possible ray tracing features, for example some games only have ray traced shadows or global illumination.
To date, the desktop GPUs with hardware-accelerated ray tracing are Nvidia’s RTX 20, 30, and 40 series, AMD’s RX6000 and 7000 series, and Intel’s Arc Alchemist series. While the image quality is the same between all these providers, the performance is not. While the RTX 4080 and RX 7900 XTX performed roughly the same in rasterized scenes without ray tracing, the 4080 was generally faster with ray tracing enabled. AMD’s graphics cards generally have less ray tracing capabilities than Nvidia or Intel’s. Additionally, ray tracing benefits from more powerful hardware, so higher-end graphics cards can achieve higher frame rates than lower-end graphics cards. Some smartphone chips also support it, and Arm’s next-generation Immortalis GPU improves on it.
An important problem with ray tracing is that, even with hardware acceleration, it is a relatively very slow way to render. In the latest games, the highest level of ray tracing can drop the frame rate in half. More importantly, only part of the game is a ray tracing scene. Nvidia is pushing DLSS technology to make ray tracing playable at frame rates over 30FPS, but there’s no denying that ray tracing is a performance killer.Another problem is that not many games support ray tracing, according to PCGamingWiki According to statistics, there are 170 games with ray tracing capabilities, but only about 90 are shown in the list provided by the website. Some of these games are Minecraft and Quake 2 etc., and while these games are great, the graphics aren’t as realistic as other modern AAA titles. Ray tracing is already a bit difficult to implement in games, and when you consider that only DX12 and Vulka support ray tracing as a priority, it’s easy to see why so few games support it.
So, is ray tracing the practical future or a gimmick?
The usefulness of ray tracing has been debated ever since Nvidia’s RTX 20-series came out. On the one hand, it’s arguably the most realistic way to render lighting, and it takes full advantage of high-end devices with high-end GPUs and CPUs. But on the other hand, it’s a frame rate killer, and there are only about 20 ray-traced games released every year, at least for now. One of the things that really prevents ray tracing from becoming a staple in games is its lack of content support, which has been a problem for years. When Nvidia first announced its ray tracing-capable RTX GPUs and RTX software in 2018, it also promised that ray tracing would be in 21 existing and upcoming games. Of the 21 games, only 9 supported it in some form. Ray tracing didn’t even appear in Atomic Heart, which Nvidia has been heavily promoting since 2018.
Currently, even if you have a GPU that supports hardware-accelerated ray tracing, it may not be enough to guarantee that you can use it. This is not to say that this technology is not futuristic, but at this point in time, ray tracing is a niche function, an awkward position between future big things and practicality. Judging by the latest movies, ray tracing can make 3D scenes look great, but ray tracing has to get into more games, and there must be faster graphics cards to really speed up its practicality.
