El ray tracing introduced in 2018 with silicon based graphics cards Nvidia turing, and it is being sold as the great novelty of this new generation of consoles. However, there are still many players who are not very clear about what this technology consists of, and if it has a real impact on the game. gameplay when sitting on the couch and playing a game. Let's explain a little about what the famous ray tracing and if today, it is worth it or not.
What is ray tracing?
El ray tracing it is not a new technology. Basically, it consists of lighting a computer-designed scene in the same way that light would in the real world.
This, which may seem so simple a priori, is not for our computers. simulate light It supposes an enormous effort at the computational level, since the computer has to calculate each ray of light, and determine which rays bounce, which are absorbed and which others will be covered by an object, generating shadows.
Ray tracing has existed theoretically for decades, and has only been implemented by a few animation studios that were powerful enough to be able to render scenes using this technique. Until 2018, the idea that we could have graphics cards in our computers (or consoles) capable of simulating rays of light still seemed distant. Even today, four years later, there is still a lot of work ahead, and there are many video games that do not particularly benefit from the technique, due to the difficulty that still exists when implementing it.
Ray Tracing vs. Rasterization
Software engineers ran into the barrier of power when they first tried to apply ray tracing, so they had to come up with a system to make it easier for silicon. That was how the rasterization, which is the model that has been used —and continues to be used— in practically all the video games we know of.
rasterization works the opposite of ray tracing. First, each object in the scene is painted in color. And then, mathematical logic is applied to determine the lighting and shadows, even though the effect is only applied to the pixels that are in the camera's field of view. Although this system may seem a bit archaic, the truth is that it has been perfected so much that you can even get results very similar to what is achieved with ray tracing. Nevertheless, ray tracing is always going to have higher quality shadows and reflections.
Therefore, the goal of ray tracing is to render three-dimensional environments in the same way that images are formed in our world. For the moment, ray tracing will coexist for many years with rasterization. Today, ray tracing has many limitations, and there is still a technical ceiling when it comes to moving certain games to very high resolutions, something that rasterization has solved efficiently.