Examples of the photorealism achievable with ray tracing in Unreal Engine. (Image courtesy of Epic Games.)
You’re reading these words thanks to the rays of light linking your eyes and your screen. Anything you see—your car, your dog, your own face in the mirror—is the result of ping-ponging light rays, a three-dimensional game of billiards where your eyes are the pockets.
What nature can do instantaneously, computers can only replicate through intensive effort. While it’s entirely possible to simulate hundreds of thousands of light rays to render an image of a car, a dog or a mirror, it’s not easy. This is a technique called ray tracing, and it can produce incredibly photorealistic graphics—but slowly. For a long time, ray tracing was far too processor-intensive to use for most graphical applications.
Last year, graphics company NVIDIA upended this limitation with the release of its latest RTX graphics cards. In what NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang referred to as the holy grail of the computer graphics industry, RTX graphics cards promised that ray tracing algorithms could now be completed in real-time—even for games running at 60fps.
While NVIDIA had put the hardware in place for real-time ray tracing, software developers needed to catch up to make it available to their users. Epic Games, for instance, put real-time ray tracing into beta in Unreal Engine 4 earlier this year. Unreal Engine is a game engine that’s seeing increasing use as a platform…