The quick look at raytracing technology we saw earlier this week from Remedy Entertainment was impressive, but it's nothing like the demo that's hit the intertubes today thanks to a new release by Epic Games. Partnering up with Nvidia to create a PC that cost upwards of $120,000 just to run the demo in real time, it looks absolutely stunning. In fact, if we hadn't told you that this was a rendered PC demo, I bet you'd be hard pushed to realize that it wasn't live action.
Remember, this is rendered in real time and though the PC powering it is incredibly powerful, it's likely only a couple of generations away from being consumer grade. Think about that.
The real time raytracing technology is made using Microsoft's DXR framework built on top of Nvidia' RTX technology and rendered on a set of Volta GPUs. Epic's demo is truly breathtraking - and it's only at 1080P and running at a cinematic 24FPS. Even at that low resolutions and frame rate, The reflections show just how lacking baked in lighting solutions are and gives us a good idea of how amazing games will look in just a few years time.
The hardware required to run such a demo was a system built with four Nvidia Volta cards using Tesla V100 graphics chips, each of which costs around $30,000. However, if we can do this with that hardware now, give it until 2020 and more mainstream systems will be able to do it.
Or maybe even sooner. As PCGamesN points out, Metro developer 4A Games is going to show off a new demo later this week for Metro Exodus, which purportedly uses realtime raytracing. Better yet, Metro Exodus is launching later this year.
Get hyped.
