Epic's Star Wars Unreal Engine Real-Time Ray Tracing Demo Will Blow Your Jedi Mind

by Shane McGlaun — Thursday, March 22, 2018, 08:02 AM EDT

Earlier this week Microsoft and NVIDIA announced some major advances in real-time ray tracing using high-end gaming hardware. When Microsoft talked up its tech, the company noted that some of the major game engines out there would be integrating ray tracing, and that the new tech would be coming to video games. At the time of the announcement, all that Microsoft offered up was a single image from EA's Seed to give us an idea what games might look like.

We now have a video to showcase the photorealism that future games using ray tracing tech will offer. The demo video is from Epic and ILMxLab, and it is based on Star Wars. The video almost looks like a trailer for a live-action Star Wars movie falling somewhere between animation you might expect in CGI cartoons and film with human actors. You can check out the video below.

Epic and ILMxLab had little to say about the video with the description reading, "Epic and ILMxLab show how real-time ray tracing, which simulated the behavior of light, can bring realism to digitally rendered visuals."

If the results of the ray tracing tech seen in the video don’t get you excited for the future of video games, you might want to check your pulse. Microsoft calls its tech DirectX Raytracing or DXR. It didn’t give any indication when the tech was announced when we might see games using it turn up on the market.

In addition to support with the Unreal Engine, DXR will also be supported by EA Frostbite, EA Seed, Futuremark 3DMark and the Unity Engine.

Tags: Nvidia, Microsoft, Unreal Engine, (nasdaq:msft), ray-tracing, directx-12

Epic's Star Wars Unreal Engine Real-Time Ray Tracing Demo Will Blow Your Jedi Mind

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