Hey guys. So I don't know if anybody knows here or is in touch with these kinda things but over the past few years ray-tracing and path-tracing technologies have been improving and there has been a great deal of research
and expansion in it. For those unaware of ray-tracing/path-tracing, both are a rendering technique to generate very photo-realistic images as opposed to the other common method of rendering called rasterization.
Of the two (raytracing and pathtracing) path-tracing gives much better results but in-turn is much more complicated and computationally intensive.
The down-side of ray-tracing is that it can't be used in real time as it requires a great deal of computation. However researches are being made continuously to improve this and these techniques have already been
incorporated into most games "somewhat". What I mean by "somewhat" is, that games aren't being made solely based on this technique, instead these are being used for visual effects and things such has lightmapping,
reflections and shadows. Although it's quite possible that rasterization be totally replaced by path-tracing in the future. You might have heard the name of Octane Render, a powerful commercial physically-based renderer
and Unity has support for it as well.
Things have taken greater shift in 2018. AMD Radeon has announced the release of Radeon Pro Render which is basically a GPU based Path tracer/Physically-based renderer, the best part being "It's open-source".
From Radeon's own site..,
It has already been integrated or is being integrated into a couple of well known softwares namely, Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, 3DS MAX, Maya, Blender, etc.
Head over here for more details.
Radeon ProRender Technology
On the other hand Microsoft has announced DirectX ray-tracing or DXR, an API for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. Previously, if the developers wanted to ray-trace reflections or shadows they had to do it themselves.
Different implementations involved using compute shaders or doing calculations inside the fragment shader and there was no known place for ray-tracing the graphics pipeline. DXR brings a general API which is
"hardware-accelerated" for this purpose and introduces a ray-tracing pipeline state together with dedicated raytracing shaders.
What this means, developers can now use raytracing (for reflections, shadows etc) together with rasterization and have a full fledged API for this purpose. This is very big step.
NVIDIA has already announced support for this in their new RTX technology which uses DXR. They showed off the results at GDC 2018, a demo made on Unreal.
Another demo from Remedy Entertainment..
For more details on DXR, head over to..
Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing! – DirectX Developer Blog
For the average general populace, what this whole means is, you'll be getting more eye-candies for games soon enough xD
THE HYPE IS REAL BOYS :flame:
[MENTION=24667]V3N0M[/MENTION] @NaNoW @Solid Link
Edit:- Can we share this on the home page? @NaNoW
and expansion in it. For those unaware of ray-tracing/path-tracing, both are a rendering technique to generate very photo-realistic images as opposed to the other common method of rendering called rasterization.
Of the two (raytracing and pathtracing) path-tracing gives much better results but in-turn is much more complicated and computationally intensive.
The down-side of ray-tracing is that it can't be used in real time as it requires a great deal of computation. However researches are being made continuously to improve this and these techniques have already been
incorporated into most games "somewhat". What I mean by "somewhat" is, that games aren't being made solely based on this technique, instead these are being used for visual effects and things such has lightmapping,
reflections and shadows. Although it's quite possible that rasterization be totally replaced by path-tracing in the future. You might have heard the name of Octane Render, a powerful commercial physically-based renderer
and Unity has support for it as well.
Things have taken greater shift in 2018. AMD Radeon has announced the release of Radeon Pro Render which is basically a GPU based Path tracer/Physically-based renderer, the best part being "It's open-source".
From Radeon's own site..,
It has already been integrated or is being integrated into a couple of well known softwares namely, Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, 3DS MAX, Maya, Blender, etc.
Head over here for more details.
Radeon ProRender Technology
On the other hand Microsoft has announced DirectX ray-tracing or DXR, an API for hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. Previously, if the developers wanted to ray-trace reflections or shadows they had to do it themselves.
Different implementations involved using compute shaders or doing calculations inside the fragment shader and there was no known place for ray-tracing the graphics pipeline. DXR brings a general API which is
"hardware-accelerated" for this purpose and introduces a ray-tracing pipeline state together with dedicated raytracing shaders.
What this means, developers can now use raytracing (for reflections, shadows etc) together with rasterization and have a full fledged API for this purpose. This is very big step.
NVIDIA has already announced support for this in their new RTX technology which uses DXR. They showed off the results at GDC 2018, a demo made on Unreal.
Another demo from Remedy Entertainment..
For more details on DXR, head over to..
Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing! – DirectX Developer Blog
For the average general populace, what this whole means is, you'll be getting more eye-candies for games soon enough xD
THE HYPE IS REAL BOYS :flame:
[MENTION=24667]V3N0M[/MENTION] @NaNoW @Solid Link
Edit:- Can we share this on the home page? @NaNoW
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