Items tagged with ray tracing
Gaming graphics have been on a constant improvement trajectory since the early days, with new technologies leveling up the experience. Ray tracing has been one such focus that brings gorgeous lighting, better shadows, and more realistic game worlds to the forefront of gaming. Not without hurdles, the primary...
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Happy launch day, folks! Not just for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080 graphics cards (which release to retail today), but also for the much-anticipated PC port of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 after launching exclusively to Sony's PlayStation 5 console two years ago, to much acclaim. The port brings some...
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Indiana Jones has been a legendary franchise for movies, and it is no surprise that it continues to push out new content. While there have been Indiana Jones-themed games in the past, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the latest, next-generation iteration. What also comes with new games is typically a slew of...
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Two things you can always count on when it comes to Indiana Jones are his iconic leather jacket and his trusty whip. Three things, if you add his fedora into the mix. It looks like all three will be included in Bethesda's upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle game, and if you're planning to play on PC, there's a...
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Alan Wake 2, one of the best games of 2023, will get even better for gamers who opt to play it on Sony’s upcoming PlayStation 5 Pro. Remedy, the game’s developer, says that it put in significant effort to ensure that it “is taking full advantage of Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro to enhance the game experience further.” This...
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Last week Doom fans got a nice surprise when Doom and Doom II got upgraded with a re-release that brought several quality-of-life improvements to these classic titles. However, there was one modern update that was missing -- ray tracing. Well, that’s no longer the case after Shirokii released a mod that includes realtime path tracing for Doom
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NVIDIA has enjoyed a substantial lead in ray tracing performance for the last few product releases, but things may soon be changing. AMD's upcoming RDNA 4 architecture may bring with it a significant increase for ray tracing capabilities, for both PC and console gamers.
One of the beneficiaries of this will be...
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The benchmark specialists at Basemark are putting the final touches on a new GPUScore Breaking Limit tool, which the company says will make its debut as its most demanding ray tracing benchmark for both mobile and PC. Basemark's plan is to release two versions: Breaking Limit for mobile devices, laptops, and desktops...
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The penchant for video games to develop better graphical capabilities has been ingrained into development DNA since the first playable games were released decades ago. Fast forward to current times and Microsoft wants to improve the performance on low VRAM GPUs when combined with ray tracing with its new patent...
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Back in the day, before the ubiquity of discrete graphics cards with powerful programmable engines, 3D games used what we now term "software rendering." This means that the graphics renderer ran purely on the system's CPU, rather than benefiting from dedicated hardware acceleration. This practice persisted longer than...
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The original Max Payne is now more than 20 years old, designed for the era of the PlayStation 2 and first-gen Xbox. Some fans of the title refuse to let it die and have released a new mod to bring Max Payne into the modern era. You can now run Max Payne with full path ray tracing, but be warned, it's going to be...
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If you want to know how ray tracing works, it's all in the name: the renderer simulates ("traces") the bouncing of light "rays" to determine how the scene should be lit and colored. This is great, but objects are huge and light particles are very, very small. To get truly simulated lighting, you would need billions...
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UL Solutions, the creators behind 3DMark, have launched a new 3DMark ray tracing benchmark called Solar Bay that is designed to stress test and benchmark GPUs. This new benchmark is different from 3DMark’s other ray tracing benchmarks, like Port Royal and Speed Way in that it supports both Android and Windows PCs. As...
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While AMD's Radeon GPUs aren't as renowned for their ray-tracing prowess as competitor NVIDIA's, they're fully capable of handling the effects, particularly when games are programmed to match the hardware—just take a look at how Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition runs on red-team GPUs. In combination with the fact that...
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If you're a dedicated fan of the original Portal, then chances are high that you're familiar with Portal: Prelude. For everyone else, Prelude was a popular fan-made mod that serves as an unofficial prequel to the megahit game that introduced us to Aperture Science, the portal gun, and murderous AI GLaDOS.
Well...
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One of the PlayStation 5's most beloved and exclusive titles, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, is headed for a release on PC thanks to the efforts of Nixxes Software (owned by Sony), which worked with Insomniac Games to port the title over to Windows. Touted as a "visual spectacle" with ray tracing support, you'll need...
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Let's talk about path tracing, hardware-heads. While the difference between ray-tracing and path-tracing has been debated, the industry has largely settled on using ray-tracing as an umbrella term covering all ray-traced effects, while path-tracing typically refers to renderers that use ray-traced methods for the...
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was originally released in 2015, but developer CD Projekt is still updating the game. The title is up to patch version 4.03, and that version is available for PCs as well as PlayStation and Xbox game systems. That includes the last-gen consoles, so PS4 players and Xbox One gamers get to come...
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The relatively-recent re-makes of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 were updated recently, and the patched version appearing on Steam seemed to remove the ray-tracing and 3D audio options for most, if not all, users. It was a big enough bungle that we even reported on it, commenting that it could be just as easily...
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Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 and 3 PC remakes have taken a step back in graphical fidelity, as ray tracing has been removed from their graphical options. The change was spotted by gamers just ahead of the weekend, but at the time of writing we don’t know whether this retrograde step was made on purpose.
The curious...
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When NVIDIA unveiled its grand plans to bring real-time ray-tracing to computer games, those of us in the audience who understood what that really meant were cautiously optimistic. It's probably fair to say that most of the uses of ray-tracing in PC games thus far have been a little underwhelming in comparison to...
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Polish developer CD Projekt Red seems to be among the few game publishers of decent size that understand the PC market: once you release a game, it doesn't vanish from the market after a few weeks, months, or even years. It stays in shops, and people will continue to buy it if there's a reason to do so, like the major...
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