The holy grail of gaming lighting systems has always been raytracing. All of the simulated lighting effects that you thought were so pretty in the past are nothing compared to it, because raytracing is literally the practice of replicating the billions of points of light and their photons as they bounce around a room of interact with objects in the wider world. It's incredibly resource intensive, which is why we've only typically seen it in pre-rendered scenes that takes hours or days of powerful computers chugging away to make it happen. But perhaps not for much longer.
At the Games Developer Conference, both Nvidia and Microsoft showed off a new raytracing system within a DirectX demo that could usher in a new-generation of in-game lighting. The raytracing was made possible through a new DirectX Raytracing system, abbreviated to DXR. Nvidia's part in it is using DXR to create a new system of rendering tools called RTX, which will make it easier for developers to bring those lighting effects into their games without doing too much heavy lifting.
The results, speak for themselves.
What's immediately apparent in the demo are the stupendous numbers of reflections in objects around the scene, showcasing the rest of the environment in their distorted ways, whether in the water on the floor, the lamps on the table, or the chrome fittings that are everywhere in the "Northlight" scene. It's a beautiful demo that should mean games in the near future look just as good with the right hardware.
No specific games were announced to be using this system as of yet, but PCGamesN's highlights that a number of developers, from Epic, to Remedy, to 4A and EA have all got demos ready to show, so there will be a good few games leveraging it in the near future no doubt.
Now if only we could buy a GPU that could run it...
