Nvidia, microsoft, epic games and unity show what the next generation of games will be like.

Today begins the Games Developers Converence, better known as GDC. In it, the main video game companies and developers come together to show us what the next generation of games will be like. Ray Tracing, DLSS and artificial intelligence will be the keynote of this GCD 2019, and to open our mouth we have an official statement from Nvidia that gives a good clue of where the shots will go.

Ray Tracing will be part of the main game engines

We are on our way to the year when Nvidia removed something that would undoubtedly be the base on which the next generation of video games would settle. Ray tracing in real time is not the discovery of fire, before this type of technology existed for the professional environment and video editing. What was a great novelty was bringing it to our "modest" desktop computers, so that we could all enjoy its advantages.

It arrived, but taking small steps, once again the hardware was ahead of the software and the gaming companies had to put the batteries to update their graphics engines and enter the new generation. The first of them was Frostbite, an impressive engine that can be seen in titles like Need For Speed ​​and of course in Battlefield, which take Ray Tracing to the last battlefield V battle title. Then it would be 4A Engine with its new Metro Exodus, which we have talked about at length in Professional Review in multiple comparisons.

This list will soon be expanded to the rest of the graphics engines. All this will revolve around the Nvidia GameWorks RTX tools that provide rendering techniques for the games and support for the new version of Microsoft DirectX Ray Tracing (DXR). Ray Tracing's Matt Wuabbling, Marketing Manager, referred to Ray Tracing as the most radical change to occur in video games since the appearance of programmable shaders 15 years ago. Undoubtedly it will be, especially when technology advances and graphics engines bring out the best of these possibilities, even today somewhat basic and little optimized in the titles that implement it, we dare say.

Unreal Engine and Unity join Ray Tracing club

We all know the power of Unreal Engine and the graphic quality that revolutionized the market with titles like Deux Ex or Splintell Cell, which left us absolutely speechless. Then Frostbyte would appear to do the same, and so to this day with a huge number of games on the market, each of them squeezing to the maximum the possibilities of the engine behind them.

But what is really a graphics engine? Well basically it is a program that acts as a development platform to create video games. With this program we will be able to create physics, renderings, program and even provide the elements with artificial intelligence. Well, Unreal Engine and Unity are two of these game engines that have already announced that they will implement real-time ray tracing, so that developers have a next-generation platform to develop their games.

The Unreal Engine 4.22 trial version is now available and will be announced definitively next Wednesday , March 20 by Epic at the GDC. Similarly, Unity, the favorite engine for Indie games like Ghost of a Tale, will also implement Ray Tracing in its interface for GiHub users in its 2019.03 version.

Ray tracing has also hit other engines as we already know. Among them we highlight DICE / EA's Frostbite Engine, Remedy's Northlight Engine, Crystal Dinamics, Kingsoft, Netease and the odd other study. It is the future and creators must adapt to it and create their titles with the available technology, and we hope that very soon all these titles will implement Ray Tracing to a great level, and of course DLSS will be improved for its performance.

GTX cards will also have Ray Tracing

We already said it and so it was rumored, the rest of the Nvidia cards with Pascal architecture also have hardware capable of reproducing Ray Tracing. Nvidia hopes to launch some drivers in April for Pascal and Turing architecture cards that make Ray Tracing compatible in the games that implement it for these GPUs that so many of us have today.

Great news for many, although it remains to be seen how it will affect the final performance of the game, especially with more modest cards like the GTX 1060. The processing will be done in the shader cores, so the performance may vary depending on the capacity of the card and the game itself and its volume of effects. All games with Microsoft DXR and Vulkan API support will support RT. Good benchmarks and friendly articles are coming!

Obviously the performance will not be comparable to the new RTX, which have dedicated cores for this purpose. In fact, the performance offered by the RTX will be between two and three times higher than the GTX. It is something assumable and understandable, it will only be to carry out tests to see how far we can go with them.

GameWorks RTX and new games and demos at GDC

As we said at the beginning of the post, Nvidia has presented its Nvidia GameWorks RTX video game developer toolkit. These tools will help creators implement Ray Tracing in titles, and it will also be an open source tool that includes plugins for Unreal Engine 4.22 and Unity 2019.03.

It also includes the RTX Denoiser SDK library to perform fast RT with noise reduction techniques and that reduce the number of rays needed per pixel. It also includes algorithms for shading areas, satin reflections, ambient occlusion, and diffuse global illumination, much needed in the open world.

Another important tool will be Nsight for RT, which is independently developed and will be used to help developers debug and create graphical applications based on DXR and other APIs.

GDC games and RT experiences, such as “ Control, ” have also been announced in a new video from Remedy Entertainment showing the power of Ray Tracing. Also Quake II RTX, which is offered in a remastering developed by Nvidia that implements Ray Tracing through Nvidia VKRay, an extension of Vulkan.

It is expected that many more will be arriving soon on our wish lists, it only remains to wait and see how events unfold in these next days of this GDC. But where more news will come will be at E3 this year, with those frames shown from The Elder Scroll VI, the expected Halo Infinite or a Final Fantasy VII Remake with RT? We will see very soon.

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