A year ago, NVIDIA introduced the first video cards with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing, after which games that use this technology began to appear on the market. So far, there are not too many such games, but their number is steadily growing. According to NVIDIA research scientist Morgan McGuire, around 2023 there will be a game that "needs" a GPU with ray tracing acceleration.
At the moment, ray tracing is used in games to build reflections, refraction of light, and to create global illumination. However, whether to use it or not is up to the user, who can choose between tracing and more familiar shading. Actually, there is nothing surprising here, because video cards with full support for ray tracing have not yet received sufficient distribution due to their high cost.
I predict that the first AAA game to REQUIRE a ray tracing GPU to run will ship in 2023, and every gaming platform will offer accelerated ray tracing by that year.
— Morgan McGuire (@CasualEffects)
And the NVIDIA expert believes that by 2023 such video cards will be so widespread that the first AAA-class game will appear on the market, which will require a graphics accelerator capable of real-time ray tracing to run without fail. McGuire bases his assumptions on the fact that new progressive technologies in the gaming field need about five years for mass distribution.
We also can't help but note that AMD VP and CMO Scott Herkelman said he agrees with an NVIDIA spokesperson for the first game to require hardware-accelerated ray tracing.
Hey look! We finally agree on something?.
- Scott Herkelman (@sherkelman)
A notable impetus for the spread of ray tracing technology will be the release of next-generation consoles. Both Sony for its new PlayStation 5 and Microsoft for the future Xbox have announced support for this technology. AMD also plans to give its future Navi-based graphics cards the ability to use real-time ray tracing.
However, the emergence of games that rely entirely on ray tracing for rendering images will not happen very, very soon. Still, this rendering method requires very significant computational resources. Therefore, for quite a long time games will use the so-called hybrid rendering, combining rasterization and tracing, which is already used in some games, for example и .
Source: 3dnews.ru