Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic (Unreal Engine), believes that the next-gen consoles might implement this technology.

Metro Exodus is likely going to be the first game on PC to use ray tracing (previously, we talked about the ILMxLab tech demo that showed Star Wars and this technology), but it will need time to become widely used. Still, Sweeney told MCVUK (quoted by WCCFTech) the following: „It turns out that at around 25 teraflops operations per second, ray tracing becomes the best way to produce realistic looking pixels. The demo we showed in partnership with ILMxLab is the first step in that direction. Part of the scene is rendered, and part is ray traced, all the shadows and reflections come from ray tracing, and like movies, game engines are going to adopt this. You’re going to see more and more ray-traced elements in our scenes, and I think ten years from now you might find nothing but ray tracing in our engines. Everybody who’s starting a triple-A project, they all should be thinking about ray tracing.”

So consoles and PCs will start to use it. What about smartphones? „It’s not coming to your smartphone anytime soon. But GPUs move fast. You might find within two years that you have that amount of computing power in a single GPU. And suddenly it becomes possible at high-end,” Sweeney responded.

Two years, huh? 2020 is when the next PlayStation and Xbox are rumored to launch. Will those be capable of ray tracing, though? It’s unlikely at the moment!

Source: WCCFTech