WORLD BUILDERS

After hardware, and then API support, you need a game engine. This is where we can see what is really feasible in the real world. These are the top ray-tracing engines so far.

Brigade

Something different from OTOY, Brigade is a real-time path-tracing game engine based on the company’s Octane 4 rendering engine. It claims to be able to path trace scenes at 30–60fps, although nothing beyond demonstrations has appeared as yet. Interestingly, OTOY has a deal to integrate Octane into the Unreal Engine. This is worth watching, as we are jumping straight to path tracing.

Unreal Engine

Developed by Epic Games, this first appeared in 1998, powering the FPS

Unreal. It has been behind dozens of major titles since, and is now on version 4. The Unreal team has been working closely with Nvidia to incorporate RTX enhancements. Nvidia partnered with Epic to create some of its own showreels.

Unity

A huge cross-platform engine that boasts that it is used to produce half the world’s games. It first appeared in 2005, powering Apple games, but it spread rapidly. Support for real-time ray tracing is supposedly on the way, but we have nothing beyond some vague rumors as yet.

Frostbite

This engine was developed by Electronic Arts, originally for the

Battlefield series of games. Its latest incarnation supports ray tracing via Microsoft’s DirectX Raytracing (DXR). Other Frostbite titles include FIFA,

StarWarsBattlefront, and Needfor Speed. Its BattlefieldV is the first big title to support ray-tracing effects.