By Pulkit Garg

The first image is a TV feed and the second is from ProjectCarst

You probably thought that video game graphics have gotten pretty good, but did you realize that they have become this good? As programmers and designers are able to constantly improve video game graphics, will there ever be a point where they become equivalent to real life?

That moment has finally come.

Moore’s Law, a computing term which originated around 1970, states that the processing power of computers doubles every two years. This directly leads to computer graphics increasing significantly over the years.

So how does all of this matter in the game development industry?  The best way to increase the graphical fidelity of a game is to add realistic lighting: Left with no lightning, right with a single light source.

Left with no lightning, right with a single light source.

But while adding lights in a game is relatively easy, and something we’ve been doing for decades, getting the light to bounce off, reflect, refract, and move around realistically is a much more difficult problem to solve.

The forefront of photorealistic graphics today is seen in the computer-generated imagery used in movies. If you’ve seen  Avengers: Infinity War, you could reasonably argue that CGI is pretty much photorealistic already, and that’s because big-budget movies use a lighting technique called ray tracing for their CGI.

Ray tracing calculates the path of a beam of light backwards from your eye (or viewpoint) to the objects that the light interacted with. It’s what makes reflections, shadows, and refractions look extremely realistic. But here’s the catch, “Ray tracing is so computationally intensive that it takes days, or even weeks, to render these worlds even with many computers working together in render farms.”

So you may ask the question, with the immense increase in computational power, why I do not have ray tracing? The answer sadly is, you can have it, but for 1.4 lakhs.

With the launch of the RTX graphics cards, NVIDIA is bridging the gap between pre rendered and real time graphics. This new series is specially developed with ray tracing in mind and with the launch of some big AAA ray tracing supported games coming up, including the likes of Battlefield Shadow of the Tomb Raider. I am sure everyone’s excited. Are you?