As Ken wrote up his take in a separate post, NVIDIA has made Turing architecture details public, which will bring real-time ray tracing to PC gaming later this month. When it was announced, NVIDIA had some demos in Unreal Engine 4, and a few partnered games (Battlefield V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and Metro Exodus) showed off their implementations.

As we expected, Unity is working on supporting it too.

Not ray tracing, but from the same project at Unity.

The first commit showed up on Unity’s GitHub for their Scriptable Render Pipelines project, dated earlier today. Looking through the changes, it appears to just generate the acceleration structure based on the objects of type renderer in the current scene (as well as define the toggle properties of course). It looks like we are still a long way out.

I’m looking forward to ray tracing implementations, though. I tend to like art styles with anisotropic metal trims and soft shadows, which is difficult to get right with rasterization alone due to the reliance on other objects in the scene. In the case of metal, reflections dominate the look and feel of the material. In the case of soft shadows, you really need to keep track of how much of a light has been blocked between the rendered fragment and the non-point light.

And yes, it will depend on the art style, but mine just happens to be computationally expensive.