Ray Tracing technology is getting more support from developers these days. In the next four years, the first AAA titles will start to require a GPU supporting this technology, at least according to the prediction by one NVIDIA engineer.
In a tweet, NVIDIA's Morgan McGuire said the first AAA game that will require a ray-tracing GPU will be released in 2023. He added that more gaming platforms would start offering accelerated ray tracing that year.
Both the Xbox Scarlett and PS5 have been confirmed to support ray tracing, which makes McGuire's statement quite interesting as it implies that other than these two platforms, consoles from Nintendo, Google, and other companies will come with ray tracing support.
Ray tracing has existed for non-real-time rendering purposes, but not until recently that the technology has become more viable for real-time rendering. It has provided realistic lighting by stimulating and imitating the physical character of light.
Nvidia has an obviously vested interest in seeing developers embrace real-time ray tracing-its GeForce RTX cards are the first consumer offerings to wield dedicated hardware for ray-traced visuals. It's actually a hybrid solution through Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API. Parts of a scene get ray-traced, while other parts use good old-fashioned rasterization rendering. This allows for realistic lighting and reflections in things like puddles and certain objects, without overburdening the graphics card on parts of a scene where ray tracing does not matter as much.
As for games, graphics hardware would have to make a huge leap before we see something that's fully ray-traced, at least in the AAA category. McGuire's prediction means that future games would look more stunning, but it's hard to buy into his statement. Imagine developers in the future going, "Either you enable real-time ray tracing, or you don't get to play." It sounds pretty unconvincing, at least for now.
The rest of his tweet though is clear to see. Microsoft and Sony are already developing game consoles with support for ray tracing. Project Scarlett and the next PlayStation will run an AMD Navi GPU that supports the technology, and both are likely to launch next year. As for Nintendo, well, they're not a direct competitor to these two in terms of hardware. Just look at the Switch - tiny, beloved by all, and yet in no way near to the hardware specs of Xbox and PlayStation consoles.
As for McGuire, his tweet is still up. What do you think? Is it too soon for AAA games to require ray tracing?
