Light go boing.
And sometimes it goes floing (refraction)
And on rare occasions sproing (defraction)the most short and understandable answer yet
If you want pretty graphics this is good.
If you want many frames this is bad.
There has long been the claim that CPUs (these days GPUs, but the claim predates GPUs) that can ray trace your games with plenty of frames are just around the corner. So far that hasn’t happened and most people working on CPUs/GPUs are pessimistic of it. Maybe you could raytrace something simple (tetris?) in real time, but modern games put in too many objects.
Your exactly right. If graphic quality stood still for a couple years, Ray tracing speed would catch up and be on parity. We keep pushing more polygons and other things that keep putting ray tracing behind a bit.
That’s kind of why it started to become feasible, right? Graphics quality has only incrementally improved over the last decade or so, vs geometrically improving in decades past
ray tracing mimics the way light bounces around on surfaces in real time. it does this by tracing rays from light sources in game and colouring the objects they hit. the rays then “bounce” off of the objects and redo the same step of colouring. this needs to be done for every pixel you can see.
in regards to it changing video games: idk, how much do you care about lighting?
Something quite important to keep in mind is that this is nothing new, there have been raytracers since at least the 70s. However, they were never anywhere near real time. A simple scene with just a few simple objects could take hours to render.
That it is now possible to do with much more complex meshes, more lighting and much higher resolution and also many times per second shows how much faster (and specialised) the hardware has become.
Ray Tracing I believe is the CEO of GeForce.
It’s a lighting technique that creates more realistic visuals, especially reflections.
The technique allows the GPU to “track” / calculate how the light should actually travel and what it bounces off of (like light in real life), compared to the pre-calculated methods of before.
So it will cost you processing power and therefore frames, but it greatly increases the visual accuracy of lighting, shadows and reflections.
A simple but effective example is Minecraft with Ray Tracing. The following video showcases the difference:
https://youtu.be/9qxfavtUs7w?si=pBSq7iysC0HvHoYz
Notice how the game looks completely different. That’s what lighting can do for a game.
Obviously this is less noticeable when it’s a game with realistic graphics and a lot of time spent on getting the (prebaked) lighting just right.
It’s a hardware intensive process that tries to make lighting as realistic as possible. So, which areas are illuminated, which are in shadow. From an artistic perspective, this is very important to how a user visually processes any particular image.
No, not really. Just better graphics.
Games need to figure out what color to show for each pixel on the screen. Imagine shooting lines out from your screen into the game world and seeing what objects they run into. Take whatever color that object is supposed to be and put it on the screen. That’s the basic idea.
To make it look better, you can repeat the process each time one of the lines hits an object. Basically, when a line hits an object, make more lines – maybe a hundred or a thousand or whatever the programmer picks – and then see what those lines run into as they shoot out from the point in all directions. Mix the colors of the objects they run into and now that becomes the color you put on screen.
You can repeat that process again and again with more and more bounces. As you add more and more bounces it gets slower though – since there are so many lines to keep track of!
When you’ve done as many bounces as you want to do then you can shoot out lines one last time to all the lights in the game. If there is an object in the way blocking a light, the color for the object you’re trying to figure out will be darker since it’s in a shadow!
It’s an old and simple idea to figure out what color something is like that by bouncing off objects repeatedly… but it’s hard to do quickly. So, most games until very recently did not work that way. They used other clever tricks instead that were much faster, but made it hard to draw reflections and shadows. Games with those other techniques usually did not look as good – but you could actually play them on old computers.
