Ray-traced hybrid rendering is now emerging as one of the key emerging technologies in PC gaming (and one of the features of next-gen consoles in 2020). However, these effects currently require NVIDIA graphics cards with RTX hardware support. But, , the creators of World of Tanks showed ray tracing effects in their popular multiplayer game that work with any DirectX 11 class graphics cards, including those from AMD.
Now Wargaming has released a demo of World of Tanks enCore RT (you can download it ), thanks to which owners of graphics cards without RTX support can check the ray tracing in the game, albeit with reservations. Instead of offering the full range of effects found in some DirectX 12 games with DXR, ray tracing in this case is limited to improving the quality of shadows. The developers also offered a video with a detailed story about the technology:
The main advantage of the upcoming update of the Core engine is the support for qualitatively new, softer and more realistic shadows. This will be possible thanks to ray tracing technology. New shadows will appear for all "live" gaming equipment (excluding destroyed vehicles) that are exposed to sunlight. The fact is that the technology is demanding on resources, and therefore its application was limited only by technology.
Ray tracing in WoT uses the Intel open source Embree library (part of the Intel One API), a set of performance-optimized cores that provide a range of ray tracing effects. Wargaming has limited itself to shadows for now, but may implement other effects in the future.
“Reproducing incredibly soft and natural shadows is just the beginning of the era of ray tracing in game graphics. Thanks to this technology, we can recreate realistic reflections, global shading and general lighting in real time. But the full implementation of the effects is a matter of a more distant future, ”the company writes.
Interestingly, NVIDIA , which will bring ray tracing to classic PC games, as it did in .
Source: 3dnews.ru