Raytracing was merged into Dev-Rendering!

[Tim_Hobson]

@NilsonLima

@Morningcoffee007 I think @Antidamage mentioned Experimental as the keyword to describe a feature once it is released. The real time RayTracing feature will debut first as Experimental before even going to Early Access, like it happened with Niagara, and that will take a bit for the feature to leave Experimental and going into Early Access to finally going into Released.

Ray Tracing and Path Tracing features will ship as “Early Access” for 4.22.

Early Access for UE4 is defined as such:

Features available in Early Access give you the opportunity to learn how they work, plan your pipeline, and create test content. You should use caution when shipping with features in this state as they may not be optimized for performance or stability and may not be available on all platforms. We support backward compatibility for assets, and the APIs for these features are stable.

Experimental for UE4 is defined as such:

Features are sometimes made available in an Experimental state so you can try them out, provide feedback, and see what we are planning. We do not recommend shipping projects with Experimental features. Please keep in mind that we do not guarantee backward compatibility for assets created at the experimental stage, the APIs for these features are subject to change, and we may remove entire Experimental features or specific functionality at our discretion.

The RT Devs are tirelessly working to have some really cool things out the door at the launch of 4.22 for everyone. Improvements are being made rapidly in our 4.22 branch and not directly in our Dev-Rendering stream. Once the cutoff for 4.22 is made and features are stabilized, those changes will be merged back down to our Main branch and then down to the Dev-Rendering branch soon enough.

RT won’t have every feature at launch, like Landscape support, which has been mentioned a number of times here, but it’ll have a lot for everyone to check out. I’m not sure how long it will stay Early Access, but over the next release or two, there will be additional features coming online for sure!