NVIDIA, Microsoft, Epic Games and Unity make it clear at GDC 2019 that the future is RayTracing

Robert Sole 19 March, 2019

0 954 2 reading minutes

NVIDIA RayTracing technology has already been implemented in Unreal Engine, Unity, Frostbite Engine, and other graphics engines.

A few hours ago NVIDIA has reported that RayTracing will reach the GTX 10 Series and GTX 16 Series in a 'simple' version. It seems the company wants to show users that they are missing out by not buying a GeForce RTX. The company is not alone as it has shown at a Game Developer Conference. At this conference, members of Microsoft, Epic Games and Unity have shown the potential of RayTracing and Artificial Intelligence in gaming.

RayTracing native to graphics engines

NVIDIA bet pretty strong releasing specific graphics for RayTracing with no real implementation of the technology. Three games on the market with support for this technology do not compensate for the cost of a Turing graphics. It is a bet on the future of the company and that is also due to the lack of direct competition in graphics. The truth is that this technology is here to stay and will be gaining prominence. Clearly the hardware has come before the software and now developers are adapting to the change.

ray tracing remedy

The first graphics engine adapted for RayTracing is Frostbite, which has been used to create the games Need for Speed and Battlefield V. The latter already integrates RayTracing natively. Shortly after, the one that received support for RayTracing was 4A Engine, the graphics engine used to develop the Metro Exodus title.

It is expected that the list of graphics engines that support this technology will gradually increase. For this there are tools such as NVIDIA GameWorks RTX that offer rendering for games with support for Microsoft DirectX RayTracing (DXR). Matt Wuabbling, Head of Marketing at NVIDIA has said that RayTracing will be the most radical change in video games in the last 15 years. Above all, it highlights that there is still a lack of improvements in the technology and in the graphics engines to take full advantage of this technology.

unity graphics engine

Unreal Engine implements it natively

Possibly the Unreal Engine graphics engine is the most used graphics engine today due to its graphic quality. Version 4.22 of this graphics engine that will arrive on March 20 will be officially presented at the GDC. Additionally Unity will publish an update of its graphics engine for RayTracing on GitHub in version 2019.03.

But not only Unreal Engine offers support for RayTracing, it has also been implemented in other graphics engines. Frostbite Engine from DICE / EA, Northlight Engine from Remedy, Crystal Dinamics, Kingsoft, Netease and others from smaller studios. All the studios will adapt to this technology complemented with DLSS to improve performance.

unreal engine graphic engine