Ray tracing isn’t new, but its implementation in the world of video games is. NVIDIA was the first to go in this direction and did so in a very ambitious project that cost them a lot of criticism with the GeForce RTX 20 series. This new generation of graphics cards introduced specialized cores and showed that such a “Holy Grail” of the rendering world indeed, it could work in PC games, albeit with some limitations.

I have already explained to you all the keys of ray tracing, also popularly known as «ray tracing», which is its name in English, so I will not expand much, because you can enter the previous link and dive into this technology if you have doubts. Basically what ray tracing allows is to generate lighting effects, direct and indirect, reflections, refractions, caustics, shadows and contact shadows. highly realistic.

For this, lightning and a complex collision system based on the classic hit-or-miss model are used, which generates a huge load that a traditional GPU cannot cope with on its own. Specialized hardware introduced by NVIDIA, the RT cores take care of freeing the GPU from this burdenbut that doesn’t mean it’s “free”, it also consumes render time and that means it ends up having a performance impact, albeit much less compared to what would happen without said hardware.

Ray tracing is no longer a peculiarity, even new generation consoles have adopted it

And today, there is no doubt that its acceptance and popularity is growing. But can we say that this is enough to consider the arrival of ray tracing in the world of video games a success? I think so, but half and I’ll tell you why. I consider it a success because when used correctly makes a huge difference and it really gives the game a completely unique next-gen look.

However, I think it is a partial success because its implementation is not as good as it should be in some cases and because we see very bad adaptations which don’t really add any value and directly could have been lost in limbo. The inclusion of ray tracing in the “next gen” patches for Resident Evil 7, Resident Evil 2 Remake, and Resident Evil 3 Remake are prime examples, as ray tracing doesn’t look good, it’s quite low quality, and even produces graphical glitches. .

The executions are so pathetic are the result of a development that is based exclusively on current consoles, whose ability to work with ray tracing is quite real, since they have hardware dedicated to its acceleration, but they do not have enough power to optimally move said technology, unless certain restrictions apply, such as reflections at low resolution with interpolation or low ray countstricks that can ultimately cause graphical errors and make the result quite dull.

Considering how many games today support ray tracing, this can hardly be considered a failure. Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2 and Control are some of the clearest examples of how good such technology can make a game look, but it is true that there is still a long way to go, many improvements to be made and many bad adaptations that are need to spend. Now it’s your turn to read.