One of the most reputable researchers at Nvidia Research, Morgan McGuire, ventured to predict when the first triple-A video game with mandatory ray tracing on PC will arrive. What would this circumstance translate into? In that, a PC without a GPU compatible with lighting technology could not play the video game.

According to McGuire’s criteria, the date would be 2023, the year in which ray-tracing would be more than based on computers and console: “I predict that the first triple-A game that will require a GPU with ray tracing to run will be launched in 2023”, he explained in his Twitter account, guaranteeing that all gaming systems will have more than assimilated technology by then … a circumstance that would undoubtedly benefit Nvidia itself and its range of GeForce RTX cards.

Being a spectacular lighting technology, and although not available to all budgets today, would it justify the inclusion or not of ray tracing to allow playing a video game on PC without any impact on the merely playable? An interesting prediction, but that has not gone beyond the tweet of the Nvidia Research scientist.

In computer graphics, ray tracing is a rendering technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light as pixels in an image plane and simulating the effects of its encounters with virtual objects. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of visual realism, usually higher than that of typical scanline rendering methods, but at a greater computational cost.

This makes ray tracing best suited for applications where taking a relatively long time to render a frame can be tolerated, such as in still images and film and television visual effects and more poorly suited for real-time applications such as video games where speed is critical. Ray tracing is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and dispersion phenomena (such as chromatic aberration).

Source: PC Gamer