Ray Tracing and Gaming

One technique that was used creating the images for those movies is called “ray tracing”. This is an alternative rendering technology compared to what actual graphic cards on modern PCs and consoles do. For many years ray tracing has only been used for offline-rendering and the generation of pictures for movies often took many days to calculate. Real-time ray tracing has been made possible with the OpenRT Ray tracing library.

PC Per has a great article taking a look at Ray Tracing in-depth. Anyone who has used a 3D design program knows what this is, but it’s not too often we see it’s effect in games. There are plenty of explanations and examples (even video) in the article.