What Is Ray Tracing?
In the 3D computer graphics field, according to Wikipedia, ray tracing is a kind of technology of rendering for creating an image through tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of encounters with virtual objects.
The technique can generate a high degree of visual realism, more so than typical scanline rendering technologies, yet at a greater computational cost. This enables ray tracing most proper for software where costing a comparatively longer time to render graphics will be tolerated like in still computer-generated images and film & television visual effects (VFX), but more poorly for real-time programs, such as video games where speed is crucial in rendering each frame.
Ray tracing is able to simulate various optical effects like scattering, refraction, reflection, dispersion phenomena (e.g. chromatic aberration). While, path tracing is a type of ray tracing that is capable of producing depth of field, soft shadows, indirect light, ambient occlusion, motion blur, and caustics. It is an unbiased rendering method. However, a great many rays must be traced to obtain high-quality reference images without noisy artifacts.
About PS5 Ray Tracing
As you can figure out from the above contents, the technology of ray tracing is quite demanding and popular. It is mostly used in movies, but not something that you see in current console games. Yet, with the powerful PS5, ray tracing will no longer be rare in video games on consoles. And, there are already games with ray tracing like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. However, some games won’t support ray tracing on PS5 such as Demon’s Souls.
“There is ray-tracing acceleration in the GPU hardware.” Said Mark Cerny, the system architect of PlayStation 5. He is keen to emphasize that the new PS5’s ray tracing feature is a full-heart solution, clarifying it will not be a simple software-level fix. PS5 adopts AMD Radeon RDNA 2-based graphics engine with up to 2.23 GHz (10.3 TFLOPS).
Current and Future Condition of Ray Tracing
Besides PS5 ray tracing, the newest generation of Microsoft game console Xbox Series X, which was released on November 10, 2020, also supports ray tracing. It seems that ray tracing is the future hot tech of the graphics field.
Yet, some people do not be optimistic about ray tracing. First of all, ray-tracing rendering in real-time is computationally heavy, which is why the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-series graphics cards have dedicated ray-tracing units. While the other GPUs make use of software simulation to offer ray-tracing rendering, which isn’t powerful enough to run ray-tracing effectively.
You can’t use ray tracing in a 4K game while running at a smooth 60 FPS unless you are running an extremely powerful computer such as a PC with GeForce RTX 2080 Super. Otherwise, switching to ray-tracing will surely drop your frame rates on most powerful machines though with the deep learning super sampling (DLSS) tech.
yet, both Xbox Series X and PS5 ray tracing, both of which adopt PC-derived CPUs and GPUs from AMD, can change all that. The specifications of both consoles aren’t better than a high-end gaming PC. Yet, optimizations and how the hardware works together in a dedicated console can deliver more performance than raw specs alone would suggest.
Therefore, it is going to be full ray tracing support in-game consoles in the future. Thus, a less demanding yet still effective, mix of ray-tracing rendering and more traditional rasterization to generate more realistic graphics and lighting.
Moreover, the coming new consoles can normalize ray tracing in games. The developers are more likely to equip ray tracing in their games if users that have ray-tracing supported consoles are much more than those running PCs. And that can make ray tracing less demanding thanks to software optimization. Finally, users running computers with less powerful graphics cards can still enjoy ray tracing.
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Helen Graduated from university in 2014 and started working as a tech editor in the same year. Her articles focus on data backup & recovery and disk management. Through an in-depth exploration of computer technology, Helen has successfully helped thousands of users solve their annoying problems.
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