What Is Ray Tracing?

If you’re a gamer, there is no doubt that you’ve heard of this cool new tech. It’s capable of producing impressive visual realism during gameplay. Better than anything we have seen before. If you’re that person who thought that the current generation consoles were the pinnacles of modern day gaming graphics, then you’re in for a surprise. But what exactly is ray tracing? It’s a term a lot of gamers hype these days. However, they can’t seem to explain it very well.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique for generating images by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. In simpler terms, ray tracing is basically an emulation of how light works in the real world. The same way you see light bouncing off your shiny car, ray tracing technology will try to replicate that in a game. It’s capable of simulating a variety of optical effects, such as reflection, refraction, scattering, and dispersion.

The problem with ray tracing

It requires a lot of power, especially when implemented in games. However, with still images such as movies, ray tracing works impressively well. Pixar’s Cars 3 is an example of a movie that used this technology. It shouldn’t be a problem in the future as companies are producing powerful hardware capable of ray tracing. Nvidia has released their all-new powerful RTX 20 series graphics card and there have been rumors that the next generation PlayStation 5 will be capable of this technology. It may be expensive now, but as hardware gets cheaper and easily accessible to the masses, this technology will be standard.

Check out the comparisons below.

GRAND THEFT AUTO V (GTA 5)

As you can observe. The overall quality of the game has improved immensely. It’s amazing how lighting can impact the way we observe images. Buildings, chairs, cars, and water look far more realistic because of the way light interacts with these objects. Prior to this technology, light was simulated in a way that looked fake. The images looked dull and unrealistic compared to ray tracing.