Items tagged with ray tracing
One of NVIDIA's major selling points when it introduced its GeForce RTX graphics cards based on Turing was the presence of dedicated RT cores to handle ray-traced visuals. It has been somewhat of a slow march to ray-traced territory by developers, though things have certainly improved. And looking ahead, Cyberpunk 2077 will embrace ray tracing effects in a big way. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most anticipated games in recent history. We are optimistic it will live up to the hype. It should certainly look gorgeous, if nothing else, from what we have seen so far. "In addition to featuring CD Projekt Red’s fantastic open-ended gameplay, Cyberpunk 2077 is also blessed with jaw-droppingly beautiful,...
Read more...
Who would have thought that Minecraft would be worth the effort to add ray-traced visuals to its blocky textures and comparatively simple graphics? But that's what happened, and the Minecraft with RTX beta turned out to be a wonderful example of how ray tracing can benefit a game, as we saw in our hands-on impression. Now a month later, gamers who have been pining for more are getting their wish. NVIDIA today announced the release of the Creator Worlds Pack #2. It features five new Creator Worlds with new gameplay, and of course those delightfully traced rays that make Minecraft with RTX pop. And according to NVIDIA, you can expect to see new uses of RTX's ray-traced effects, along with new physically-based...
Read more...
At this point, it seems one of two possibilities are most likely—either Crytek is getting ready to announce a remastered version of Crysis, complete with support for real-time ray tracing, or the developer is trolling us. The latter does not make much sense, so we are much more inclined to believe the former, based on the latest leak. Before we get to that, let's recap Crytek's cryptic Twitter post earlier this week. Crytek's official "@Crysis" Twitter account had been silent dating all the way back to December 2016, then this past Monday, it came out of hibernation and posted in all caps, "RECEIVING DATA." This led to a flurry of speculation, especially in light of the Crysis.com domain...
Read more...
No, your PC's water cooling loop did not spring a leak (we hope not, anyway), it is just sweating in the face of a rumored Crysis remake potentially being in the works. While nothing is certain (yet), the official Twitter account for Crysis posted a cryptic tweet hinting that something is afoot. Could it be a remaster with real-time ray tracing, perhaps? The tweet simply states in all caps, "RECEIVING DATA," with no other information, pictures, links, or videos attached. It is the first tweet to come from the official account since December 13, 2016, so it has been dormant for nearly three and a half years. At this point, it seems like only something big would awaken the account from its slumber....
Read more...
We are eagerly anticipating the launch of Doom Eternal, especially after developer id Software boldly stated it's the "best game we've ever made." There are plenty of reasons to believe that is true. Unfortunately, real-time ray tracing is not one of them, because as much as id Software likes playing with shiny new technologies, implementing fancy ray-traced visuals just was not in the cards. That is going to be a disappointed to anyone who forked over a fistful of dollars for a GeForce RTX series graphics cards. Technically, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX cards support ray tracing as well, though the GeForce RTX series has dedicated hardware to make such a thing feasible, especially on a triple-A titles...
Read more...
Even though Microsoft is not sharing many concrete details about Project Scarlett, the codename for its next-generation flagship game console, the company is certainly building up expectations. It seems Microsoft has some clear goals in mind, some of which it has been sharing lately. So, what do we know about Microsoft's plans and goals? That depends on who is doing the talking. Last week, Xbox boss Phil Spencer made it clear Microsoft's goal is to be competitive with Sony's PlayStation 5 console in power and pricing right out of the gate. What was not really the case when the Xbox One debuted. "I would say a learning from the Xbox One generation is we will not be out of position on power or...
Read more...
NVIDIA has a game studio with the sole task of bringing ray tracing effects to old titles to spruce up their looks. Confirmation of plans to ray trace additional classic game comes from a job listing that the company posted looking for someone to join its NVIDIA Lightspeed Studios team. As for what the name of the game the person who lands the job in the listing will be working on, NVIDIA is mum. All the listing says of the game is that it is a title "you know and love, but we can't talk about it here." NVIDIA has shown off Quake II RTX, but the job listing was posted after that game launched, so the listing isn't for someone to work on that game. Scuttlebutt suggests that the game NVIDIA is...
Read more...
Finnish game studio Remedy Entertainment makes some of the finest-looking, quirkiest games around. Perhaps best known for the Max Payne series (but not Max Payne 3, which was developed solely by Rockstar), Remedy has been publishing its games exclusively on Xbox and PC for the last several years. The studio has delivered interesting, story-driven games more recently in the form of cult survival classic Alan Wake and the more recent sci-fi thriller Quantum Break. Both games featured cutting-edge graphics for their respective times. For that reason, maybe it's no surprise that the studio's latest creation, Control, uses the most cutting-edge graphics technology available today, including...
Read more...
The battle royale genre has exploded in popularity over the last couple of years with titles like Fortnite and PUBG leading the way. Needless to say, many developers are looking to get in on the battle royale free-for-all, and the latest is Tencent Next Studios with the announcement of Synced: Off-Planet. Synced: Off-Planet puts a new spin on the genre with gameplay that seems to combine inspiration from other fictional works like World War Z and Left for Dead. You compete in a team of three; with two other human players serving beside you. Faced against you will be 45 other human opponents... and around 1,500 AI zombies (called Nanos) in a fight for survival. Having 48 humans (16 teams of 3)...
Read more...
Real-time ray tracing is headed to more games. That includes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the upcoming title slated for an October 25, 2019 release. In partnership with Activision and Infinity Ward, NVIDIA says the PC version of Modern Warfare will deliver the most immersive and photo-realistic experience, due to the addition of ray tracing and adaptive shading. "With the game’s October 25th release fast approaching, we can now reveal that the game is being enhanced with real-time ray-traced shadows, within both the single-player campaign and 2v2 Gunfight multiplayer mode," NVIDIA says. Here's a look at the first ray-traced trailer for Modern Warfare... NVIDIA has been working side-by-side...
Read more...
One of the most popular games ever made is getting a big-time facelift. At Gamescom, NVIDIA announced it has been working with Mojang and Microsoft to bring real-time ray tracing to Minecraft, the world's best selling video game, transforming colorful, block-filled worlds into richer landscapes with realistic lighting effects. This is Minecraft as you have never seen it before, and perhaps never envisioned. Since Minecraft is not particularly demanding to begin with, NVIDIA has opted to refit the entire game with path tracing, a compute-intensive form of ray tracing. In other words, this is full-scene ray tracing and not a hybrid implementation. NVIDIA did the same thing with Quake II RTX, and...
Read more...
It has always been a matter of when, not if, real-time ray tracing would see widespread support. Looking to scoot things along, NVIDIA debuted its RTX hardware last year, which leverages Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API. It has still been a relatively slow process, in terms of developer support, but things are progressing. As it relates to that, NVIDIA today announced that its OEM partners have implemented ray tracing support into 10 new RTX Studio laptops and mobile workstations. "RTX Studio laptops and mobile workstations are moving rapidly to the center of the creative industries," said Jason Paul, general manager of GeForce software and technology at NVIDIA. "They put real-time ray...
Read more...
Seeing Keanu Reeves make an appearance at E3 to promote Cyberpunk 2077, an upcoming dystopian role playing game in which he is a part of, was a delightful surprise. Less surprising, but no less welcome, is that developer CD PROJEKT RED is working with NVIDIA to support real-time ray tracing on GeForce RTX hardware (and perhaps other cards as well—more on that in a moment). "Cyberpunk 2077 is an incredibly ambitious game, mixing first-person perspective and deep role-playing, while also creating an intricate and immersive world in which to tell its story," said Matt Wuebbling, head of GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. "We think the world of Cyberpunk will greatly benefit from the realistic lighting...
Read more...
NVIDIA has an obviously vested interest in seeing ray-traced gaming take off in a big way, as the higher end versions of its latest generation Turing cards are primed for that very thing—all of the RTX models sport dedicated RT and Tensor cores for real-time ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). So, it's no surprise that NVIDIA took the reins of a ray-traced mod for Quake II and ran with it. In just a few weeks, you'll be able to play Quake II like never before. As we've reported on before, Quake II RTX is based on a Quake II Pathtraced (Q2VKPT) proof-of-concept model created by Christoph Schied, a Ph.D. student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and who...
Read more...
Intel made some interesting disclosures at the FMX conference currently underway in Stuttgart, Germany, which focuses on advanced animation, film effects, games, and other types of immersive media. At the conference, James Jeffers, Intel’s Senior Principal Engineer and Senior Director of Advanced Rendering and Visualization, held a workshop during which he announced that Intel’s Xe architecture roadmap includes support for hardware accelerated ray tracing, among a couple of other graphics and rendering-related news. There is some nuance to the ray tracing tid-bit, however. A blog post covering much of what Jeffers discussed during the workshop is live on Intel’s IT Peer Network...
Read more...
Applause broke out from the crowd at GTC 2019 when NVIDIA showcased a modded version of Quake II with overhauled graphics featuring real-time ray tracing and HDR visuals. Quake II RTX, as it is called, looks almost like a completely different game than the original version that launched over two decades ago. It was an impressive demo for sure, but NVIDIA has bigger plans for the mod. "Our goal is to publish an open source version of Quake II RTX," Principal DevTech Engineer and Quake II RTX's lead programmer, Alexey Panteleev, told AusGamers in an interview. That will be a remarkable gift to both Quake II fans and modders alike. Despite its age, there is still a bunch of interest in Quake II,...
Read more...
NVIDIA has an obvious vested interest in seeing ray tracing technologies take off in a big way, both in the way they are adopted by developers and implemented into games, and how it is all received by consumers. To further showcase what ray tracing can do, NVIDIA has released some demos, and the best part (depending on your perspective) is that they run on past generation Pascal hardware. That's right, the latest examples of ray-traced visuals do not require a GeForce RTX series graphics card, though RTX hardware (RT and Tensor cores, essentially) will still offer the best experience. More on that in a minute, but first let's have a look a video NVIDIA put together that describes the different...
Read more...
Even with all of the leaks and rumors, there is quite a bit of intrigue surrounding Navi, the next-generation GPU architecture that AMD is planning to launch later this year. We have heard it could be a mid-range solution, and there are rumblings that it will compete at the high-end of spectrum. Which is correct? Perhaps both, according to the latest chatter. Paul CrimsonRayne from RedGamingTech posted an interesting video on YouTube in which he outlines the scuttlebutt surrounding Navi. More than just loose gossip, though, Paul claims to have come across information about Navi from a source who has "proven to be extremely reliable in the past." According to what the source told Paul, AMD will...
Read more...
Dell-Alienware's Aurora gaming desktop PC lineage continues with Intel's latest 9th Gen Core processors on board and a fresh injection of ray-tracing, courtesy of NVIDIA's Turing GPUs. The Alienware Aurora R8 promises richer image quality for ray-tracing supported titles, while continuing to push performance boundaries for a compact gaming PC, with evermore powerful platform hardware and self-contained liquid cooling. RTX equipped configurations can span from an Intel Core i7-9700K paired with a GeForce RTX 2070OC, 16GB of DDR4 2666MHz RAM, and a 128GB SATA SSD + 2TB HDD system for around $2,159, on up to a Core i9-9900K with a GeForce RTX 2080Ti OC (or dual GeForce RTX 2080's), 64GB of HyperX...
Read more...
When NVIDIA launched its first trio of Turing GPUs – the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti – the headlining feature of the cards was their support for hardware-based real-time ray tracing. We’ve seen titles like Battlefield V and Metro Exodus make full use of real-time ray tracing to deliver ultra-realistic reflections, water effects, and shadows (among other visual effects) to enhance the gaming experience. The effects look amazing, but they require beefy hardware to extract acceptable performance. But given that ray tracing technology has been commoditized within DirectX 12 as DirectX Raytracing (DXR), it will soon possible for...
Read more...
When Quake II launched over two decades ago, nobody could have predicted that sometime in the future a company like NVIDIA would overhaul the graphics with real-time ray tracing technology, giving the game a luster that was unheard of at the time. But that is precisely what NVIDIA has done, at least in a demo that it showed off at GTC 2019. This is not the first time that Quake II has undergone a coat of ray traced sheen. Back in January of this year, a group of developers released what they called Quake II Pathtraced, or Q2VKPT, essentially a proof-of-concept mod that taps into NVIDIA's RTX technology for ray traced goodness. It was impressive, though not to be outdone, NVIDIA has kicked things...
Read more...
Many would not argue that the holy grail of graphics rendering is real-time ray tracing, and there are industry-wide efforts to make that a reality. Real-time ray tracing is computationally demanding, though, which is why today's solutions only ray trace parts of a scene, and not the entire thing. This also requires specialized hardware, or so it was always assumed. Interestingly, though, Crytek has released a demo showcasing a method of ray tracing being done on a Radeon RX Vega 56. This is notable because AMD's Vega GPU architecture does not contain any special hardware to handle the demands of real-time ray tracing, unlike NVIDIA's Turing GPU architecture, which optionally includes dedicated...
Read more...
