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And in another couple years we'll have real-time ray tracing!

Amazing how far and fast we've come since Wolfenstein.

That, like fusion power, is something that has been said for decades now. I like to think it'll happen, but for now we'll probably get partial ray tracing to enhance reflections and such; full ray tracing will require several generations of graphics processing still. And even then it will depend on what resolution it has to be done on; graphics cards needed years to render HD resolution and are now again struggling to do 4K and / or VR graphics. Ray tracing will be another order of magnitude more resource intensive.

Nevermind those years, it's already here: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/directx/2018/03/19/announci...

From the looks of it, the major engines are on route to supporting it, remains to be seen though if any actual games get on board.

It's a strange message that one. On one hand, we can totally do raytracing now without any specialized API. Screen space reflection is raytracing, but only on what's visible on screen. On the other, you can't possibly use raytracing as your only rendering technique for the amount of details in AAA video games. There's a reason we are not doing that now. New hardware more tailored for that kind of work will help, but don't expect the next GTA (or whatever) to have a full raytracing rendering like you see in those demo. Noticed the tiny size of the scenes? We'll see what the next generation of consoles brings us - especially since current gen are using AMD hardware and they've been really silent about this DXR announcement.

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