Ray tracing is a rendering technique that simulates the physical behavior of light to produce incredibly realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections. Once reserved for offline rendering in film production, real-time ray tracing is now possible in games, thanks to advances in GPU technology from NVIDIA and AMD—and modern game engines are embracing it.
Unreal Engine has been at the forefront of real-time ray tracing. Since version 4.22, it includes native support for DXR (DirectX Raytracing) and RTX hardware acceleration. Developers can enable ray-traced reflections, global illumination, ambient occlusion, and soft shadows—all contributing to a hyper-realistic visual experience.
Unity also supports ray tracing through its High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). Unity allows fine-tuned control over ray tracing effects, such as reflections and area lights. Although HDRP is more demanding than the standard pipeline, it’s ideal for high-end PC and console games where visual fidelity is a priority.
Ray tracing in games offers:
- Accurate reflections (even of off-screen objects)
- Natural light diffusion and indirect lighting
- Detailed soft shadows with realistic falloff
- Improved materials, such as glass, water, and metals
However, ray tracing is computationally expensive. To balance performance and quality, developers often combine it with traditional rasterization or use hybrid rendering techniques.
As hardware becomes more powerful and APIs like Vulkan and DXR mature, ray tracing is moving from a novelty to a standard. Game engines that embrace this technology position themselves for the future of photorealistic gaming—where light behaves not just convincingly, but truthfully.
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