2019 Game Developer Conference: Unreal and Unity Engine with Real-Time Ray Tracing Support

At Game Developers Conference 2019, it was announced that real-time ray tracing support would be integrated with major game engines. These include, for example, the Unreal engine and the Unity engine. Even before the conference, Crytek had announced his support for ray tracing in Cryengine (we reported). Real-time ray tracing is based on the central role of Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR) in the PC gaming ecosystem. The integration of such features into the game engines can speed up the development process and support such graphics features in the game.

Unreal Engine 4.22 is now available in draft form Final details are expected in Epic's GDC keynote address Wednesday, April 4, Unity will release optimized, production-oriented and optimized ray tracing support. real-time with a custom experimental version GitHub is available for all users with full preview access in the Unity 2019.03 version Real-time raytracing is also supported by other engines AAA owners, including the Frostbite engine from DICE / EA, Remedy Entertainment's Northlight Engine and the game engines from Crystal Dynamics, Kingsoft, Netease and others "NVidia points out.

"I think all AAA titles will include real-time raytracing in the near future"said Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research. "The integration of real-time ray tracing by the two dominant game engines demonstrates the game industry's belief that real-time ray tracing is the future of gaming graphics and that in the past, integration into gaming engines has been a watershed for technology. introduction into the entire industry. "

"The introduction of programmable shaders over 15 years ago has changed the game world in a sustainable way and today, real-time ray tracing will do the same – that's the next milestone in game development. "says Matt Wuebbling, GeForce Marketing Manager at nVidia. "The bandwidth is outstanding: standard API, integration with major game engines, multiple AAA titles, support for millions of PCs, and it's a bright future for players."

In addition, GameWorks RTX is intended to promote the development of ray tracing games. nVidia GameWorks RTX is a toolkit for developers to implement real-time ray tracing effects in games. GameWorks RTX is available as open source under the GameWorks license and includes plugins for Unreal Engine 4.22 and Unity's Preview 2019.03. Are included:

• "RTX Denoiser SDK – a library that provides fast real-time ray tracing by providing denoising techniques to reduce the number of rays and samples per pixel required, including algorithms for areas of interest. shadow, bright reflections, ambient occlusion and diffuse scattering Global illumination.
• Nsight for RT – an autonomous development tool that saves developers time by helping them debug and create graphical applications created with DXR and other supported APIs. "

nVidia writes about real-time ray tracing in games: "Raytracing is the ultimate solution for realistic light, reflections and shadows with a degree of realism far beyond what is possible with traditional rendering techniques."