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Real-time raytracing is a next-next-gen feature, Seed Tech Demo ran on three NVIDIA Titan V

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We here at DSOGaming have been closely following ray/path tracing rendering techniques in engines. After all, back in 2012, we informed you about the Brigade 2 Engine and claimed that ray/path tracing will be the future. And while we haven’t seen any game using real-time ray tracing since then, NVIDIA and Microsoft announced yesterday a collaboration in order to add support for such a thing in the DirectX API.

However, and while some gamers are excited about this, we should temper everyone’s expectations. As Remedy claimed, this technology remains at research level, and as such it is far from being implemented into a video game.

SEED - Project PICA PICA - Real-time Raytracing Experiment using DXR (DirectX Raytracing)

So, the big question is when can we expect to see some sort of this real-time ray tracing techniques in video-games? According to the co-founder of Hatrabbit Entertainment, Joakim Svarling, this will happen in next-next generation. In other words, we can expect games to use some form of real-time ray tracing when PS6 and Xbox Three (assuming that Microsoft keeps using the One, Two, Three names) come out.

EA’s technical director on the Frostbite engine who has also worked on the SEED tech demo, Johan Andersson, has confirmed this claim, suggesting that real-time ray tracing is still a ways off.

Speaking of the SEED tech demo, it appears that this demo ran on three NVIDIA Titan V graphics cards. Back in February, Andersson shared this image showing three Titan V GPUs, indicating that the SEED tech demo is using all of them.

Tomorrow Johan Andersson and Colin Barré-Brisebois will talk about the Pica-Pica tech demo and DirectX, so hopefully we’ll have more to share!