Real-time path tracing, the next stage of game rendering, is on the horizon, Nvidia says. But wait–didn’t RTX just get here? So what is path tracing, how is it different from ray tracing, and why does it matter Come from Sports betting site VPbet ? It’s all about the way light works–both the way developers use it and the way gamers interact with it–and about turning a complex magic trick into simple physics with the quickly-growing graphical horsepower we have in our PCs and consoles.
Whether they’re in two or three dimensions, games are an illusion. When you’re solving puzzles in Outer Wilds or dodging Margit’s giant hammer in Elden Ring, there’s a complicated tangle of mathematical magic tricks running in the background to make you think you’re looking at a natural and organic thing. Behind the scenes, your GPU is doing billions of calculations per second to make it all move and function.
While games are more graphically impressive than ever, it would be easy to look at the last decade or so of games and say that graphical advancements have slowed down–we’re not seeing the easily visible jumps in fidelity that came with the transition from 2D to 3D, or from basic 3D to more advanced rendering techniques. But the truth is that big stuff is happening behind the scenes that will change the way games are made and maybe even how we play them.
First, let’s talk about the primary different rendering methods used to put games on our screens.
Rasterization, Tracing, and Light
Rasterization is the way games are rendered right now, and the way they’ve been rendered for decades–it’ll most likely never go away completely. Rasterization is the act of rendering 3D models as 2D images. As explained by Nvidia, “objects on the screen are created from a mesh of virtual triangles… computers then convert the triangles of the 3D models into pixels on a 2D screen.” Other processing, like anti-aliasing, is then applied to those pixels to show you the final product. On a 4K display, your GPU is calculating and displaying the color information for 8 million pixels, and then refreshing that data 30, 60, or even 144 times per second.
This is computationally intensive, and so developers use shortcuts to help speed things up so that our graphics cards don’t choke on the pixels and just give up. For example, many games are rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled, or rendered in a checkerboard pattern on your screen to cut down on the number of pixels the GPU has to worry about.
As far as light goes, ray tracing and path tracing are about tracing the way light bounces in different ways, while rasterization shows you what the game world looks like if, instead of bouncing, the light just stopped at the first thing it hit. The object is illuminated, but that illumination doesn’t affect any of the other objects on the screen in front of you.