Glossary:Ray tracing (RT)
Graphics and video
Resolutions
Video settings
- Field of view (FOV)
- Windowed / borderless fullscreen
- Anisotropic filtering (AF)
- Anti-aliasing (AA)
- High-fidelity upscaling
- Vertical sync (Vsync)
- Frame rate (FPS)
- High dynamic range (HDR)
- Ray tracing (RT)
- Color blind mode
Hardware
For a list of games, see games with ray tracing support.
![Comparison of Metro Exodus and it's Enhanced Edition on Max Settings[1]](/wiki/File:RayTracingComparison.png)
Ray tracing is a rendering method in which light is realistically simulated to interact with the environment unlike traditional light rendering methods where light data is hand-crafted based on the expected or current scene/environment. Ray tracing in relation to video games refers to the simulating of light travel from designated light sources in the environment (Sun/Sky, Flashlight, Lamps, Fire, etc) to offer more realistic lighting which enhances the game's visuals and immersion.
There are various terms used to describe the method, most importantly are Ray Tracing and Path Tracing (also known as "Full" or "Real" ray tracing). Ray Tracing describes when the path of light is traced from a light source to any adjacent environment or object and back to said source, while Path Tracing continues the traversal of the light around the adjacent area until the light reaches within the camera's view or a set number of bounces is reached.
Ray tracing offers more realistic visuals by allowing light to act more realistically but the effect is generally quite demanding compared to traditional light rendering methods as the system has to calculate light trajectory in real time at the desired framerate and if the effect is not given enough rays or bounces to fully establish the path of light, the visuals can be quite noisy and flickery possibly reducing visual immersion, thus the effect has taken quite a while to become usable let alone popular in mainstream games.
Nvidia's Geforce RTX 20 (Turing) Series of graphics cards in 2018 was the first to intergrate hardware accelerated ray tracing in consumer level hardware, allowing game developers to make use of ray traced light in their games such as Battlefield V, although because of how demanding the feature is, coupled with it being exclusive to the new generation of high end gpus, the feature took a while to be found in a signiciant number of games.
Ray traced light is often incorporated in games as specific designated settings: Ray Traced Shadows, Ray Traced Reflections, and Ray Traced Global Illumination. Ray traced shadows only has shadows of objects and characters be traced, making them differently shaded depending on surrounding light and interact more seamlessly with character or object movement, ray traced reflections make glass, water and other reflective surfaces accurately mirror the world around them from the perspective the player is viewing them in, and ray traced global illuminations covers general environment lighting like a lamp in a room. Games often only use one or two of the aformentioned methods as ray tracing's computational cost makes it a risky feature for developers to use.
Path tracing is far less common due to the increased computational cost in comparison to ray tracing and covers all lighting scenarios described above leading to increased visual fidelity and immersion, there have been only a few path traced games released to date including Portal With RTX, Cyberpunk 2077, and Alan Wake 2
Various technologies have been developed in tandem with ray tracing to alleviate some of the concerns with the technology, like rendering the visuals at lower resolutions and upscaling with specialized scaling algorithms to increase performance while maintaining quality, or special denoising algorithms to improve visuals without increasing ray or bounce count.
General information