Sweeney Says New AAA Projects Should Think of Ray Tracing, Doesn't Rule It Out for Next-Gen Consoles

Epic Games Co-Founder and legendary programmer Tim Sweeney said that everybody starting a triple-A project should think of ray tracing. He also didn't rule out the possibility of next-generation consoles supporting the new technology.

[ccgr]

Can't wait to see what the next-gen console will do!

[G3ng4r]

And how much the price of games rise in the struggle for realism!

[KaiPow]

It is fascinating how one little upgrade can make sure a huge difference in rendering. Hopefully this can be something that smaller devs can easily put to use!

[frostypants]

"Little" in concept. Massive in horsepower demand.

[FinalFantasyFanatic]

Yep, I imagine only very small portions or things will get the raytracing in any given game, otherwise it'll be too demanding to render in real time.

[Cobra951]

Dream on. Maybe in another 2 gens. It's not happening on consoles with specs finalized before 2020. It isn't even possible in the consumer PC space yet. The hardware needed costs something like $60K, and the demo runs at 24 fps.

[Picture_Dancer]

Do you know that this ray tracing is made with fresh technology, prototype AI which denoise computer ganerated image. It is matter of time to optimise this new part of technology and develop custom procesors for AI operations.

[TheCommentator]

"At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, studio 4A Games revealed that it is working with Nvidia to bring real-time ray tracing technology into the latest Metro sequel... The company worked with Nvidia’s RTX tech as well as Microsoft DirectX Raytracing plugin for its graphics API, and instead of building a dedicated tech demo, 4A ended up implementing ray tracing into its next major release."
Source: https://venturebeat.com/201...

[SierraGuy]

Maybe at 4K or 8K...I'll take 1080P Ray tracing next gen. It would still knock your socks off.

[rainslacker]

I don't think we'll see full ray tracing features come next gen. The GPU's that offer it now are still pretty costly, and the hardware to run it is still to new to be affordable for a console coming in 2-3 years.

We may see some ray tracing features though.

[FinalFantasyFanatic]

Ray Tracing is very demanding, if anything, we'll see very limited application of it used in games, I also don't expect next gen consoles to have this feature in any games.

[sander9702]

Am I the only one that isn't impressed whatsoever about this slightly better looking reflections engine that demands incredible hardware.

[xenz]

Slightly better? Are you blind?

[rainslacker]

Raytracing is a pretty significant improvement to reflections, which causes much more accurate colors. Raytracing itself isn't just about the reflections of a surface, but it allows light to hit multiple surfaces giving you a much more accurate depiction of how things look when there are multiple sources of light on an object.

[frostypants]

I mean, nobody DOESN'T want ray-tracing. It's just computationally demanding AF. Even if the next gen consoles can pull it off, being able to implement it in a game without big sacrifices in other areas would be a tall order.

[quent]

4K is very demanding on GPU's

Ray tracing: Hold my beer