Wednesday, February 13th 2019
Unreal Engine Gets a Host of Real-Time Raytracing Features
Epic Games wants a slice of next-generation NVIDIA GameWorks titles that are bound to leverage the RTX feature-set of its hardware. The latest version of Unreal Engine 4, released as a preview-build, comes with a host of real-time ray-tracing features. In its change-log for Unreal Engine 4.22 Preview, Epic describes its real-time ray-tracing feature to be a "low level layer on top of UE DirectX 12 that provides support for DXR and allows creating and using ray tracing shaders (ray generation shaders, hit shaders, etc) to add ray tracing effects."
The hardware being reference here are the RT cores found in NVIDIA's "Turing RTX" GPUs. At the high-level, Unreal Engine 4 will support close to two dozen features that leverage DXR, including a denoiser for shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion; rectangular area lights, soft shadows, ray-traced reflections and AO, real-time global illumination, translucency, triangular meshes, and path-tracing. We could see Unreal Engine 4.22 get "stable" towards the end of 2019, to enable DXR-ready games of 2020.
Source:
Unreal Engine Forums
The hardware being reference here are the RT cores found in NVIDIA's "Turing RTX" GPUs. At the high-level, Unreal Engine 4 will support close to two dozen features that leverage DXR, including a denoiser for shadows, reflections, and ambient occlusion; rectangular area lights, soft shadows, ray-traced reflections and AO, real-time global illumination, translucency, triangular meshes, and path-tracing. We could see Unreal Engine 4.22 get "stable" towards the end of 2019, to enable DXR-ready games of 2020.
16 Comments on Unreal Engine Gets a Host of Real-Time Raytracing Features
www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/unreal-tournament/home
Was actually following this one close with dev streams. Shame.
But UT99 remains my favorite.
Epic can lead developers to water but it can't make them drink. Most games made on UE4 anymore are indie which are all about gameplay. Most developers won't put in the effort to implement bleeding edge technologies because that translates to money they don't have for the project in the first place. If Epic wants those features to take off, it would have to first push it out in a game like Fortnite and make it easy for developers to use.
TL;DR: Don't get too excited.
We used to play against/with each other in college in the late 90s. :)
Edit: Like this: