Unreal Engine 4.21 Preview

[anonymous_user_fbe2d247]

@DamirH

None of those games use RTX properly it’s just half-implemented, post-launch, only for early adopters of the hardware. But you don’t want to hear that nor what I am actually saying, which is: Real Time Ray Tracing is not even remotely close to being universally accepted like programmable shaders are today. An EXTREMELY SMALL subset of PC only devices having access to it means that its development should NOT be a priority because statistically speaking it makes no sense whatsoever. The main driving force behind the technology being nVidia and Microsoft will only make general adoption of it that much more slower.

Nowhere did I ever say that I don’t want to use it. But in the real world more games release on consoles, including the Switch and no one except high-end AAA studios can afford implementing a fledgling piece of tech just for <1% of their consumer base who have a RTX card. Us mortals have to develop for the lowest common denominator.

Edit: I can’t seem to find the source of the info that I’ve read regarding the RTX implementation in Tomb Raider but apparently it only uses a subset of the features and not full-fledged ray-tracing, whatever that entails.

Most of the games will use hybrid raytracing. First they rasterize gbuffer and then ray trace for effects where it make most sense. Like for GI, ambient occlusion, reflections, soft shadows. This way you don’t need to rework whole engine and you can enable/disable effects depending on performance and needs. Tracing also primary rays would be big CPU optimization(just single draw call) but depending on GPU it might be tad slower.