Ray tracing may be costly to render for even the most powerful of graphics cards, but it seems like the genie is out of the bottle. Not only are there a growing number of games with support for Nvidia's RTX ray tracing, including the likes of Battlefield V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but Crytek and now Epic Games have shown off demos of their engines running the technology. Epic's new Troll demo could be the most attractive of them all yet released.
In it we see a young woman, perhaps of royal descent, crying by a pond in a forest. Her tears and the surface of the water illuminated by the moon, and a trio of dancing, iridescent sprites (or perhaps Spren, for you Stormlight Archive fans). It's all live action recordings and rendered in real time too, though of note is that it is only in 1080P, which suggests that even with Epic's interpretation of ray tracing, the technology is still costly on the performance front.
It's running on the latest version of Unreal Engine 4.22 which Epic claims is the "fastest version of UE4 ever, with drastically reduced compile times and many optimizations and performance upgrades". That's what's made the ray tracing possible, we're told.
Elsewhere in Epic's unveiling of the new Unreal Engine, the Chaos demo showcased how physics continues to advance. The Chaos system is still in "Early Access" and won't come to the stable build until release 4.23, but it is impressive and shows that the future of games are no longer just beautiful, but deeply interactive.
