Video games have various technologies that allow you to enjoy a more immersive environment, one of them is the Laser tracewhich allows the light to act much more realistically, giving more play when creating the lighting. Microsoft seeks to create a revolution in relation to this technology, since they presented a patent that would allow GPUs with fewer resources to get the most out of Laser trace because it would consume much less VRAM.
To be one of the largest companies in the world Microsoft It is everywhere, many of its developments are used daily even if we don’t realize it, including in the field of video games, so it is not new to see the company getting involved in new technologies linked to these. Without going any further, one of the most used APIs in games, DirectX is part of Microsoft, so we see the company’s involvement in this sector.
Microsoft’s Ray Tracing would offer better quality with fewer resources
As its patent states, this technology seeks to use fewer GPU resources so that those with a smaller amount of VRAM can also use the laser trace without having the problems they currently pose due to lack of memory. This would imply that when it comes to gaming at the highest possible quality, it would be much cheaper and easier to get a computer for this purpose, although we would still have all the optimization problems that games can have video, as well as the expenditure of resources that they normally already have.
In this way Microsoft is looking for a way to ensure that the consumption of resources is intended for the use of laser trace is divided between the different components of our computer, which means that it is not only the graphics that have to bear all the weight of having to deal with this technology that consumes so many resources. Thus, they explain that the way they seek to do this is to take advantage of both our computer’s memory and storage units.
The future of ray tracing in low-end graphics
When we talk about Laser trace It is clear that we always think of extremely powerful computers with graphics much superior to those that we can find relatively cheap, since it is generally a technology directly linked to the VRAM that our GPU is able to offer. In this case we can see how the efforts of Microsoft for trying to implement this new way of laser trace in Directx 12 could be the solution so that people with video cards with a smaller amount of VRAM can also enjoy realism in lighting.
This would be a great advantage not only for PC gamers, but also for consoles, since it would also increase the graphic quality of games on these devices which usually have a much more limited amount of resources. Although we would have to see how this technology would act, because if it consumes resources on one side to prevent the graphics from saturating, we would have to see in general whether it is worth activating it or not.