Ray Tracing, a term you must have surely heard lately. It’s the latest buzz word in the gaming tech world.
Ray tracing is essentially a lighting technique used in games that brings realistic lighting and reflections to the table. Implementing realistic and life-life lighting to video games is not an easy job. It involves complex calculations that are almost impossible even for high end computers. Just think about it: take notice of say, when you’re driving around on a bright sunny day. Take notice of the role the sunlight plays in the reflections on your car, on your windshield, and in illuminating the world around you. At the same time, take notice of the areas that are hidden from the sun. See how light behaves there. See how artificial light behaves in sunlight. How light reflects on glossy surfaces, how the reflections have their own light and how that light is projected on objects around it. It is all a big complex world of complex calculations that involve reflection, refraction, scattering and dispersion of light.
And this is exactly what Ray Tracing is meant to solve. A technology by Nvidia, that is capable of making such calculations, and in turn providing literally life-like lighting effects in graphics that make a huge difference to the level of immersion. So in short, Ray Tracing is a 3D rendering technique, that can even make a game like Minecraft look breathtakingly gorgeous. What the video below if you don’t believe us.
What makes Nvidia’s technology noteworthy is that it does these complex calculations at a greatly reduced computational cost. While even in this day and age it is theoretically impossible to achieve the complex calculations of how light behaves in real time, Nvidia gets away by using smart approximations to deliver something that’s close to the same visual effect, but without being taxing on the hardware.
More and more games are picking up Ray Tracing. Battlefield V was one of the first games to implement it. Even Call of Duty: Warzone has implemented it. Other notable games using Ray Tracing is Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Have a look a video made by the GeForce Community, showcasing the Ray Tracing effects in Battlefield V.
Mind you, this is not really “real” tracing of rays in real time, because like we mentioned before, that would be virtually impossible even with the tech of today. Makes one think about how much we’ve progressed in tech but also how we have a long, long way to go. What you’re seeing in the videos is just based on smart “approximation” calculations. The results are pretty breathtaking though.
The Hardware to Ray-Trace
This new technology cannot be rendered with just about any hardware. It needs specific hardware, and that hardware is Nvidia’s Turing line-up of graphics cards i.e. the GeForce RTX series like the 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti. These GPUs have built in Ray Tracing (RT) cores meant specifically to drive Ray Tracing calculations.
Don’t get disheartened if you own the older GTX 10-series of graphics card. They can handle Ray Tracing too, just, not as well as the RTX series. Still, Ray Tracing is a challenge even for the top end RTX graphics cards. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, the world’s most powerful consumer grade graphics card barely manages 60 fps in games like Battlefield V or Metro Exodus with ray tracing enabled at 1440p. The same GPU can deliver a smooth 60 fps in 4K without ray tracing enabled.
Source: Wikipedia
Where does AMD fit in all this?
While AMD seems to be blowing away the competition when it comes to CPUs with its Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 lineup, Nvidia has managed to retain its novelty with ray tracing. AMD graphics card don’t offer any kind of ray tracing acceleration, more so, ray tracing is Nvidia’s proprietary technology.
That still doesn’t mean that the AMD cards can’t do it. They can, but again, not as effectively as the Nvidia RTX 2070 and 2080. Crytek released the Neon Noir demo where it showcased high-level ray tracing on an AMD RX Vega 56 running at a smooth 30 fps. So there you go, it’s possible, but 60 fps is much desired than 30 fps. A PC gamer of 2020 would frown at the thought of 30 fps too.
AMD’s rumored “Big Navi” graphics card is touted to support ray tracing, but whether it will be implemented the same way as Nvidia’s RT cores, we will have to wait and see.
Building a machine that supports Ray Tracing
At this present moment, the only option is getting an Nvidia RTX graphics card. If you’re gaming at 1440p, then you have no choice but the RTX 2080 or the RTX 2080 Ti, the later costing almost Rs. 1,00,000. Even the RTX 2080 Super costs around Rs. 67,000. So enjoying ray tracing can be an expensive affair.
However, if you just want to experience ray tracing at its base level, or are gaming at 1080p or lower resolutions, the RTX 2060 Super or 2070 will do just fine. These GPUs costs below Rs. 50,000.
