Thanks to new technologies we can return to playing old titles with the most significant graphical improvements, which is precisely what Dihara Wijetunga, AMD’s senior graphics R&D engineer, has achieved with Return to Castle Wolfensteinas he has wanted to show since your personal Twitter account.
For this he has used path tracing technology in this classic that was published 21 years ago
At the moment it is a project that is in a very early phase and only the images that you see accompanying the news are available, so there is not even a playable version to check the improvements first hand. Even so, we can appreciate how the mixture of the light of the Moon with that of the fire of the torches offers a spectacular effect and in different directions.
Basically path tracing shoots multiple rays of light for each pixel that calculate all the surrounding elements and bounce between them. Thanks to this algorithm, it is able to calculate how many times a single ray can bounce around the stage until its light limit is exhausted, but at the same time it makes the lighting look totally realistic.
In this other example we have a laboratory in which the lightning that appears in the middle of the screen did not cause any special effect in the original game, but with these changes the room lights up completely blue. And all this can be seen in another set of images in which the shadows look even better, although we are left wanting to see something like this in motion.
