Ray Tracing Through the Ages: From CGI Movies to Real-Time Gaming

Ray tracing has changed a lot since it first started in computer graphics. This cool technology has changed how we make and see digital pictures, from movies to video games. Let’s look at how ray tracing has grown from a slow, complicated process used in CGI movies to something that happens in real-time in modern video games. It’s made digital entertainment look much better and pushed what’s possible in computer-made images.

The Birth of Ray Tracing

Ray tracing is an old idea. It goes back to the 16th century! Artists like Albrecht Dürer used similar ideas to make realistic perspective drawings. These early techniques showed the basic principles of tracing light paths to create realistic images.

In the 1960s, ray tracing entered the world of computers. In 1968, a computer scientist named Arthur Appel first used ray tracing to make digital images. This was a big deal in computer graphics because it let computers make pictures that looked more like real life. Just like how early video games like Pong started modern gaming, Appel’s work started the amazing graphics we see today.

In 1979, Turner Whitted made another big step with recursive ray tracing. This new method let computers create even more realistic images by showing how light bounces off different surfaces and makes complex lighting effects. It was like giving digital artists new tools to paint with light, letting them make images with depth, reflections, and shadows that weren’t possible before in computer graphics.

Ray Tracing in CGI Movies

For a long time, ray tracing took too much computer power to use in real-time things like video games. But movie makers saw how it could make special effects and animation amazing. They started using ray tracing to create stunning visual effects and lifelike animated characters, even though it took a long time to make the images.

Movies like “Toy Story” and “Jurassic Park” used ray tracing to make their computer-generated images look more realistic and exciting. These movies pushed what was possible in computer animation and visual effects, setting new standards. The downside? Making the images took a really long time. Sometimes, a single frame of a movie could take hours or even days to create, needing huge computer farms to finish entire films.

As computer graphics got better, game makers also started pushing what was possible in games. Games like Age of Empires showed how strategy games could look better, even if they weren’t using ray tracing yet. These improvements in game graphics showed that people wanted more realistic and immersive visual experiences in games.

The Challenges of Real-Time Ray Tracing

For many years, using ray tracing in video games seemed impossible. Even the most powerful home computers weren’t fast enough. The main problem was that ray tracing needed too much computer power to work quickly enough for smooth gameplay.

To understand why real-time ray tracing was so hard, let’s look at what ray tracing does and why it needs so much computer power:

The complexity of these calculations, combined with the need to do them in real-time for games, was a huge challenge. For a long time, game developers had to use tricks to make games look good without using full ray tracing. They used things like pre-baked lighting and screen space reflections to make games look realistic without needing as much computer power.

The Hardware Revolution

In the late 2010s, a big change happened in computer graphics hardware. Companies like NVIDIA and AMD started making special chips designed to do ray tracing calculations really fast. These new chips, called “RT Cores” by NVIDIA and “Ray Accelerators” by AMD, could do the complex math needed for ray tracing much quicker than before.

In 2018, NVIDIA released its first graphics cards for home computers with special ray tracing hardware. This meant that real-time ray tracing was finally possible for home computers and game consoles. With these new hardware parts, the dream of using ray tracing in video games became a reality.