With each new generation, it can be easy to declare that video game graphics have reached their peak. We’ve already ascended to the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:point of photorealism, and now much of the advanced tech🌊nology is being used to enhance the finer details, to improve facial features, reflections, and make subtle environmental touches feel increasingly more nuanced and life-like.
At the centre of this progress sits ray tracing, a technology being adopted across PC and consoles with𒆙 increasing regularity. When executed correctly, games have never looked as good, but it often takes a specific case for the technology to really shine, and Lego: The Builder’s Journey is one such example - showcasing how the visual feature can be used to bring objects and surroundings to life like never before.
I recently caught up with a representative from Nvidia to talk about how the technology has matured - becoming increasingly commonplace in the world of video 🎶games - and how the company hopes for it to become normalised in both blockbuster 🌺and indie releases moving forward.
RTX as a graphics technology is becoming more and more commonplace across both PC and consoles, and I was wondering what your thoughts are on the progress that’s been made since its inception - do you see it becoming a permanent fixture in major releases as things continue to move forward?
NVIDIA has been on a three year quest to move the industry to ray tracing and we have seen a lot of industry wide progress. Ray ♓tracing is supported in Vulkan and DirectX 12 APIs. Major game engines such as Unreal and Unity have added support, along with a large number for private game engines such as Frostbite from DICE, iD Tech from id Software, Remedy Engine from Remedy Entertainment, Luminous Engine from Square Enix and more.
At this point ray tracing is prevalent in games and is supported by all GPU manufacturers and ma𒊎jor consoles. It is defi🎃nitely the way forward for the gaming industry and game developers.
DLSS has been a 🦩huge hit, being hailed as possibly the big🦋gest breakthrough in advanced graphics in a very, very long time because it turns the age-old ‘performance for image quality’ trade off that the graphics industry has always grappled with upside down.
DLSS boosts frame rates AND generates beautiful, sharp images for your games - that was previously unheard of. It delivers big performance gains without tradeoff to image quality - gamers would previously have to wait for many generations of GPUs over many years to see those types of games. The extra performance can be used to maximize quality settings and increase output resolution. And only DLSS offers big performance gains while keeping image quality comparable to native across all resolutions, even at 1080p.
I’ve often found that ray tracing is best viewed from two extremes. Experiences such as Minecraft or Lego Builder’s Journey feel perfectly suited for the technology because their environments are filled with objects and characters that perfectly compliment the visual techniques on display. However, in open-world adventures it can be easy to overlook ray tracing or simply turn it off to favour performance, do you feel there is a balance to be found here?
That’s an interest🗹ing view of it. And I can see how you would come to that conclusion. A lot of the benefit of ray tracing is very subtle, and sometimes it is even subconscious.
Your brain is trained every day as you walk through the world. And it picks up very subtle clues from lighting and other things and can instantly use that data to draw conclusions. If you see a shadow coming from behind you, you in♋stantly know that something or someone is behind you. The shadow can tell you the direction they are coming from and even how close they are. You do not have to look at it to know that. If you walk by a window, you see a reflection in it. You can see people, plac♍es and things in the reflection and use that to draw conclusions about your surroundings.
Your brain expects these queues to be there. When you play a game, and those queues are not there - shadows are missing or not accurate, or a reflection is missing - that is a constant reminder to your brain on a subconscious level that ‘this is a game, it is not really happening’. When those queues are there, as the brain expects, the level of immersion you feel while playing the game goes up dramatically. That is what makes ray tracing so promising.
It mimics the way light interacts in the real world and fools your brain into thinking you are really in Night City, or in a battle or driving an F1 caꦅr. It changes the way a game ‘feels’ as much as the way it looks. These lighting queues can change your subconscious from saying ‘the character has a grey shade cast over him, he is supposed to be hidden in the shadows. He is supposed to be scary’. It changes to a character that is actually hidden by shadows and actually is scary.
Lego Builder’s Journey and Minecraft really look amazing with reflections, ambient occlusion and shadows - they are both rather slow paced games and players have the time to really appreciate the beauty raytracing brings to these worlds.🏅 In LEGO the bricks with reflections look even more realistic.
How is the process of working with developers to implement ray tracing? Have partners become more welcoming in embracing the technology now it’s become less expensive on hardware and now even mainstream console exclusives are welcoming the technology so that many outside of the PC space can experience them for the first time?
Game developers are an easy sell for ray tracing - it eliminates the need to to hand draw in every light, reflection, shadow, etc. It mimics the way light looks and behaves in the real world. And makes their games look better. DLSS overcomes the performance tax, the industry standards are in place, and now all the major GPUs manufacture🐼rs support it.
More and more game engines have ray tracing capabilities integrated (Unity, Unreal Engine and more and more studio specific engines like Frostbite) and this makes it easier for a developer to add the different effects into a game. I expect all these things to come together and accelerate the adoption.
