Gamers and tech-enthusiast’s darling NVIDIA has launched a new engine for developers named OptiX. For the first time, its possible to have interactive real-time and ray-traced graphics on a normal desktop PC.

For the uninitiated, games today use raster graphics based engines for displaying the breathtaking visuals as seen in Crysis, Gran Turismo 5 and Microsoft’s own Forza Motorsport 3. Rather than recreating the visuals onscreen, it’s more like faking it. Ray-tracing instead of faking it, mimics how a single ray or light works in real and uses that to create uber-realistic lighting and reflection.

Ray Tracing Example

Well, agreed, there isn’t much Ray-tracing action to really trace and talk about as of now, but ray-tracing is here and it’s getting bigger. Some obvious advantages it has are:

1. Making game development easier. Since less code needs to go in and the ray-tracing engine does most of the hard-work.
2. Game designers have more time to spend incorporating detailed textures, adding on to the realism.
3. Ray-tracing is, wait for it, scalable! So using 2 processors/cores would give you a boost of 2X. Or nearly 16x for 16 cores! I’m not giving you ideal figures here, these have been achieved.

While for the time being, this technology is limited to the Quadro series. A mostly unimpressive experiment was carried out a few years ago, with a modified Quake 4 engine which used ray-tracing but the textures and technology of that era is a real let-down when you see games of today. So the real implications can only be noticed only when a major gaming studio like Crytek (the studio behind FarCry, Crysis and Crysis Warhead)  incorporate ray-tracing into their game engines for a demo.