Is ray tracing really new? - article
All the cards have therefore been revealed and we just have to ask ourselves what can really be considered next generation within these new hardware. The most obvious and effective novelty of PS5 and Series X and S, is the physiological transition from HDD to SSD, now a standard also on PC. It was more than predictable that Sony and Microsoft would also mount higher performing internal memories to ensure better performance.
But another feature bounces between the various technical specifications and is constantly highlighted as the workhorse of this new generation of consoles. We are talking about ray tracing, the light rendering technique within a scenario, which today seems to revolutionize the graphics of entire games. But is it really an innovation?
Nvidia was able to show the public the many games that will benefit from this technology, such as Control. First of all it is good to clarify the functionality and use of this technology. We can briefly say that the lighting within a videogame scene has so far been based on the physical presence of a light source and how strong it is. For example, if there is a ceiling lamp in an environment such as a room, the degree of brightness is limited to the area where the lamp is placed. If there is also a mirror in the same room, current light rendering techniques do not reflect the source, making the shadow effect even less realistic.
Ray tracing fills this gap, identifying the light source and following the rays that reflect on the surrounding surfaces, creating a compliant global illumination. Taking up the example of the room, therefore, by framing the mirror with the camera, the impact of the source reflecting on the surface will be had, making the scene brighter and the shadow areas coherent.
The demonstration by work of Nvidia in a dedicated show held in 2018 has increased the use and knowledge of this technology. The Californian company showed the general public the use of DirectX Raytracing applied on Battlefield V. With the support of the excellent Frostbite graphics engine, Nvidia relaunched the concept of how it is possible to make the image more realistic by applying ray tracing.
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Comparing the videos with RTX and those without, it was immediately clear the enormous improvement to which the Electronic Arts title was subjected. The shiny car bodies that reflected the character's image, the reflections on the puddles and the brightness of the explosions, also visible on the surrounding surfaces, are only the most evident and concrete achievements that create a more realistic and plausible setting. .
But it should be noted that the development and implementation of ray tracing dates back to a long time ago, even about 45 years ago. MAGI, Mathematical Applications Group Inc, was created in 1966 with the purpose of evaluating exposure to nuclear radiation and to do this developed SynthaVision. Starting from a source of radiation, it was thus possible to study their propagation by following their tracing in the surrounding environment. Replacing nuclear substances with light sources thus leads to the first sketch of ray tracing in history. This technology, which proved to be satisfactory, was then also applied to computer graphics in television commercials, up to the cinema.
Why hasn't it been implemented before, you ask? The one proposed by Nvidia, and now promised by Xbox and Playstation, is an evolution that starts from that base. The calculation and the technique remain fundamentally the same only that now, thanks to the computing power of the graphics cards, it is possible to perform them in real time.
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Thanks to DirectX Raytracing every game, even the current generation, is made more realistic. Here is Call of Duty Modern Warfare with active DXR. In fact, in the early days, the calculation of this technology was unsustainable for the processing systems of the time, requiring enormous rendering times. What the next-gen can do is make use of graphics cards such as the RTX 20xx and the new RTX 30xx, which process information and code strings with cores dedicated solely to this function, bringing the resulting lighting to the screen in real time. from the various light sources and the respective reflections on the surfaces.
In conclusion, is ray tracing really new? The calculation technique on which it is based is a process known for many years and used in various software with different results due to the resource used.
As for the videogame sector, the great revolution lies in having created graphics cards and processors with a computing power such as to lead to ray tracing in real time, all obviously supported by DirectX Raytracing as regards Nvdia, and Directx 12 for the AMD counterpart which will also be integrated on Series X.
