Items tagged with ray tracing
The penchant for video games to develop better graphical capabilities has been ingrained into development DNA since the first playable games were released decades ago. Fast forward to current times and Microsoft wants to improve the performance on low VRAM GPUs when combined with ray tracing with its new patent...
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Back in the day, before the ubiquity of discrete graphics cards with powerful programmable engines, 3D games used what we now term "software rendering." This means that the graphics renderer ran purely on the system's CPU, rather than benefiting from dedicated hardware acceleration. This practice persisted longer than...
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The original Max Payne is now more than 20 years old, designed for the era of the PlayStation 2 and first-gen Xbox. Some fans of the title refuse to let it die and have released a new mod to bring Max Payne into the modern era. You can now run Max Payne with full path ray tracing, but be warned, it's going to be...
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If you want to know how ray tracing works, it's all in the name: the renderer simulates ("traces") the bouncing of light "rays" to determine how the scene should be lit and colored. This is great, but objects are huge and light particles are very, very small. To get truly simulated lighting, you would need billions...
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UL Solutions, the creators behind 3DMark, have launched a new 3DMark ray tracing benchmark called Solar Bay that is designed to stress test and benchmark GPUs. This new benchmark is different from 3DMark’s other ray tracing benchmarks, like Port Royal and Speed Way in that it supports both Android and Windows PCs. As...
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While AMD's Radeon GPUs aren't as renowned for their ray-tracing prowess as competitor NVIDIA's, they're fully capable of handling the effects, particularly when games are programmed to match the hardware—just take a look at how Metro: Exodus Enhanced Edition runs on red-team GPUs. In combination with the fact that...
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If you're a dedicated fan of the original Portal, then chances are high that you're familiar with Portal: Prelude. For everyone else, Prelude was a popular fan-made mod that serves as an unofficial prequel to the megahit game that introduced us to Aperture Science, the portal gun, and murderous AI GLaDOS.
Well...
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One of the PlayStation 5's most beloved and exclusive titles, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, is headed for a release on PC thanks to the efforts of Nixxes Software (owned by Sony), which worked with Insomniac Games to port the title over to Windows. Touted as a "visual spectacle" with ray tracing support, you'll need...
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Let's talk about path tracing, hardware-heads. While the difference between ray-tracing and path-tracing has been debated, the industry has largely settled on using ray-tracing as an umbrella term covering all ray-traced effects, while path-tracing typically refers to renderers that use ray-traced methods for the...
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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was originally released in 2015, but developer CD Projekt is still updating the game. The title is up to patch version 4.03, and that version is available for PCs as well as PlayStation and Xbox game systems. That includes the last-gen consoles, so PS4 players and Xbox One gamers get to come...
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The relatively-recent re-makes of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 were updated recently, and the patched version appearing on Steam seemed to remove the ray-tracing and 3D audio options for most, if not all, users. It was a big enough bungle that we even reported on it, commenting that it could be just as easily...
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Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 and 3 PC remakes have taken a step back in graphical fidelity, as ray tracing has been removed from their graphical options. The change was spotted by gamers just ahead of the weekend, but at the time of writing we don’t know whether this retrograde step was made on purpose.
The curious...
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When NVIDIA unveiled its grand plans to bring real-time ray-tracing to computer games, those of us in the audience who understood what that really meant were cautiously optimistic. It's probably fair to say that most of the uses of ray-tracing in PC games thus far have been a little underwhelming in comparison to...
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Polish developer CD Projekt Red seems to be among the few game publishers of decent size that understand the PC market: once you release a game, it doesn't vanish from the market after a few weeks, months, or even years. It stays in shops, and people will continue to buy it if there's a reason to do so, like the major...
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Real-time ray-traced graphics were big buzz around the time that Elden Ring was first announced. Close to the release, Bandai-Namco, the game's publisher, also announced that the developer FromSoftware would be releasing a patch for its magnum opus that adds ray-traced effects. Well, that patch is here now.
The release of the update was
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Graphics chip maker NVIDIA and game developer CD Projekt Red have showcased a stunning new version of Cyberpunk 2077 at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco as promised. The key change to this already graphically glorious PC gaming title is the implementation of path tracing. This means that ray...
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A ray tracing technique known as path tracing looks set to make it to mainstream PC gaming, thanks to an SDK release by NVIDIA today. Implementing real-time path tracing is claimed by the graphics centric firm to be “the next frontier in video game graphics.” With an SDK available, we should start to see this...
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NVIDIA is hosting an event at GDC 2023 that will discuss the integration of path tracing technology into Cyberpunk 2077's highly anticipated RT Overdrive graphics mode. NVIDIA's senior developer technology engineer Pawel Kozlowski, and CD Project Red's global art director Jakub Knapik will be speaking at the event...
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Valve has delivered an OS update which adds native ray tracing to the Steam Deck. The first game benefitting from this change is DOOM Eternal. At the time of writing, the necessary Steam Deck OS update is a beta, version 3.4.6 Beta to be precise, so some will prefer to wait for a mainstream update before testing ray...
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It seems like every game is getting the ray-tracing treatment these days. We are not complaining because, so far, these improvements have made games that may not have aged well otherwise look gorgeous. One of the first was for Quake II, which breathed new life into the genre-defining arena shooter. Now, fans of...
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If you weren't a PC gamer when the original Portal released in October of 2007, you probably don't realize the immense impact that the game had. Debuting as part of The Orange Box package, along with the complete version of Half-Life 2 as well as Team Fortress 2, it was arguably the dark horse of the set. Striking...
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Hardware benchmarks specialist, Basemark, is getting ready to release a new product called ‘GPUScore: In Vitro’. In brief, In Vitro is claimed to be the world’s first ray tracing technology benchmark for mobile devices. The tool has been crafted to provide users and reviewers a good reference point for judging new and...
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