Ray Tracing Will Make Your Games Look Awesome – In Five Years

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Nvidia recently revealed their new lineup of cards at Gamescom and it made some pretty big waves across the industry. Finally, we have within our grasp something developer ‘gods’ like John Carmack and others have talked about for years: ray tracing. The GeForce RTX cards will be the first to offer real-time rendering of this snazzy tech in video games, making it the biggest step in graphics technology for quite some time.

Ray tracing is, to put it simply, the tracking of single rays of light and calculating how they behave when passing through something, how they refract and how they bounce. This is used to determine what reflections, colors, brightness and so on are supposed to be shown in a scene. Up until now, we have relied upon nifty texture tricks and shaders to ‘fake’ natural light and reflections in games. It works pretty well nowadays but it does have some serious drawbacks.

The immediate one is production cost. Since everything needs to be determined by hand and baked into every single object it, of course, has to be produced and made by some graphics designer. Think of it as animation that is done by hand instead of making use of performance capture or ragdolls. The other drawback is that the scenes cannot be very dynamic, you can only show reflections on the surfaces and the places that are directly shown before you. And lastly, it simply might not look very natural.

On the other hand, ray tracing does not need as much information to be baked into an object since it will actually simulate the rays of light that are emitted from a source and how this light bounces and refracts on different surfaces. It is a concept that has been around for quite some time and is one of the things that makes CG movies look so much better than video games. Until now, it has been way too intensive for graphics engines and cards to try and render this in real-time. In engineering terms, you no longer need to specify exactly how reflections and shadows are to be cast on a textured surface, you only need to give the surface physical properties and the ray tracing will take care of making everything look good. In other words, less overhead for better yields. At least, that is the theory. In practice, it probably still needs some massaging to look just right or not cause all of your memory to vanish in a puff of smoke. Another thing that Nvidia demonstrated is that it also allows for objects and scenes to be more dynamic and changed on the fly as well as drawn outside of the rendered frame. This means that you can have explosions behind you, and they will be reflected in surfaces ahead of you to a much larger extent than you see happening today.

Nvidia’s new card will surely usher us into the ray tracing era, but recommending these flashy new cards for anyone is hard right now. The RTX 2080 will go for something like $800 when it is released and sadly the overall performance of these cards are a bit questionable. Looking at the footage of Battlefield V, Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider it is undeniable that the RTX cards will make them really pop and shine in a way that few graphic bumps have in many years. However, for all the information Nvidia released at their event, there is one gaping omission; a comparative benchmark.

They did show graphs and numbers with the new cards being a whopping six times faster than the previous GTX (1060,1070,1080) cards. Looks good, right? Not quite. The benchmark they presented only compared the cards in RTX mode, something that the old cards would obviously perform poorly at. The fact that they do not show an honest comparison of the old and new cards speaks to them not being that different in overall performance, or perhaps even worse. If you are sitting on a decent current gen card, a new 2070 will probably not give you that much of a boost unless the games make use of the ray tracing technology. We will, of course, not know for sure until the cards are out there and real benchmark tests can be performed so keep that in mind while you drool over the fantastic footage that is circulating out there.

The history of graphics cards and proprietary effects is also littered with overhyped disappointments. Not many games today use the much hyped PhysX system anymore or even the Nvidia HairWorks system. While ray tracing is likely to be the future since it really helps to simplify the work that goes into creating great lighting and awesome effects, will the Nvidia system play nice with AMD cards and vice versa? Or are we in for another format war having some games look great if you happen to have the right brand of cards? Especially since the next suite of consoles will likely make use of AMD architecture for its graphics, this will be an interesting question to observe in the coming years.

My own rule of thumb when it comes to graphics cards is to put yourself around the mid-tier and look to upgrade in a couple of years. Since game graphics are unlikely to change with leaps and bounds these days, I would say that you can probably sit comfortably with a GTX 1060 and above for many years and not feel it getting that much slower. Down the line when more and more games support ray tracing, we will probably be on the next generation of cards anyways so taking a step back and waiting for a year or two might be prudent.

That said, the demos look really nice and I have to admit that it is the first time I have been excited over new graphics features in a long time. The era of giant leaps in fidelity and effects is likely well in the past; the future will see more incremental increases in graphics quality. Ray tracing might well be one of the last such drastic bumps we will see for a long time but holding off until we know more is definitely the right course of action here.

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