The main utility of Ray Tracing is to be able to offer complete and non-simulated indirect lighting effects, which affect elements such as reflections, the amount of light emitted on objects, shadows, ambient occlusion and even advanced cinematic effects such as field of view blur and motion blur. Well, of all of them, the ones that are the easiest to execute are shadows and their advantage over conventional shadow maps is that they allow you to create what are called soft shadows and all this at a cost well inferior to the traditional method.
Shadows via Ray Tracing in A Plague Tale Requiem
The form of generating sombras in los games consists of rendering a photogram adicional, pero donde la cámara de la escena es el objeto que proyecta la sombra y lo que se calcula es el búfer de depth, el cual será usado como el mapa de sombra de the scene. The problem? It requires a large amount of video memory access and on hardware without Ray Tracing support it takes longer to run. Not only that, but using ray tracing to calculate the scene’s shading allows for what we call soft shadows, which have the following characteristics:
- They are not affected by resolution, so we can say goodbye to those shadows that cut our eyes just by looking at them.
- You can generate subtle and diffuse shadows if needed, even different levels of twilight can be generated.
Thus, we not only win in terms of performance, but also visually. However, they have a problem and this can be seen with the latest patch for A Plague Tale: Requiem on PC, which adds Ray Traced shadows to the game. And the consequences on this one demonstrate the difficulty of adding it as a patch to an existing game.
Why does the game look worse with Ray Tracing?
In order to simulate an advanced lighting system, artists, graphic designers and graphic programmers use their talents and knowledge in the world of 3D world generation to overcome the limitations of rasterization. So, in the end, the so-called hybrid Ray Tracing that combines the traditional way of creating 3D graphics in games with Ray Tracing only works if one algorithm calculates the scene with direct lighting and the other the indirect one. To do otherwise means the visual quality drops, which is the problem in A Plague Tale Requiem.
Because the cost of ray tracing is high, programmers can choose, for performance reasons, which elements of the scene are not affected by ray tracing. The example of the scene above can be clearly seen in the fact that in A Plague Tale Requiem’s Ray Tracing mode, objects farther away have much less shadow cast than objects closer to the camera. Causing the effect of lower visual quality in the game.
Although the biggest issue is adding ray tracing to a game where it not only doesn’t add anything visually, but also doesn’t improve the frame rate. On paper, ray tracing should not only provide better visual quality in certain visual effects, but also give better performance.
Is Ray Tracing a failure in games?
The answer is no, the big problem is that next-gen consoles due to technical limitations cannot run Ray Tracing properly and on PC at the moment the market share of people with decent graphics card justifies the creation of ‘a game requiring a graphics card card with such capability has not yet appeared. Simply put, we don’t have the equivalent of a late ’90s Quake 3 that required you to have a 3D card yes or yes, or the latest Doom 3 for GPUs with programmable shader support.
If we look at Steam user stats, we’ll see that only one in four users currently own a graphics card with the necessary hardware to run graphics algorithms through Ray Tracing. So it’s more a question of market share than anything else. Therefore, we have yet to see the Killer application in the form of a game selling gaming graphics cards of such capacity.
