Rendering

Ray Tracing

Simulating light by tracing rays

Also known as: RTX · Hardware ray tracing · Ray traced reflections · Ray traced shadows · Ray traced global illumination

Rendering Lighting Technique

Definition

Ray tracing renders images by following rays of light through a scene, to find what they hit and how light bounces between surfaces. It produces accurate reflections, refraction, soft shadows and global illumination that rasterization can only approximate. Recent graphics cards have hardware to speed it up, and games use it for selected effects, often in a hybrid with rasterization, while offline renderers use it for the whole image.

In production

In games it appears as ray traced reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion and global illumination, usually with a denoiser and an upscaler to keep the frame rate. Artists notice it in how materials, especially reflective ones, react, and in the need for clean, closed geometry. Offline, ray tracing is used by Cycles, Arnold, Karma and Toolbag, where more samples give a cleaner result.

Tools that use Ray Tracing

Unreal Engine 5

Engine

Blender

Modeling

Marmoset Toolbag

Render

Definition

In production

Tools that use Ray Tracing

See also