Ray Tracing: The sine-qua-non of Future?

Ray Tracing was introduced first with the Nvidia RTX 2000 Series graphics cards. From an optional feature, it has demonstrated a trend to become an essential feature in the near future.

Published by the well-renowned Bethesda Studios, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the game in question which lists hardware-level Ray Tracing as a minimum system requirement.

While from a developer's standpoint, it is a nice-to-have to implement the latest gaming technologies, the inclusion of said technologies as a requirement signals that the optional is becoming a trend. In the years after 2020, Ray Tracing has risen to become that feature.

Gaming consoles are the most accessible and convenient option for enjoying gaming. Buy a console, and it works—plug-and-play! The interface is built for ease of use.

The launch of the current generation has had a common thread: the consoles support hardware-level Ray Tracing, whether it's the Xbox Series Consoles or the PlayStation 5 generation.

Computer Graphics Cards, being the original pioneers of Ray Tracing brought out the feature in 2018 with the Nvidia RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti. Nvidia's competitor, AMD followed suit and released its own line of Ray Tracing capable hardware. Even Intel, with its Xe line of GPUs, has invested heavily on Ray Tracing.

Ray Tracing has witnessed huge inclusion in hardware releases. This begs a simple question, is the trend more than technological progress?

Gaming technology has progressed continuously, over the years. In recent years, the big players have been competing furiously. Competition, as a rule, has been said to always bring about progress. Be it the progression of gaming APIs, such as DirectX and Vulkan, or new features, including Ray Tracing.

If all hardware releases in recent years have included support for Ray Tracing, is it not natural that it becomes a given? The problem, however, is not Ray Tracing.

The factors that warrant the worry are multiple. First is the exclusion factor, some hardware from the previous generation still has enough performance to run games, normally without Ray Tracing. The Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti is one such legendary graphics card, which performs reasonably well but it appears knee-capped while Ray Tracing.

Secondly, is the high pricing. For many years, there has been no new GPU with acceptable gaming performance below the $250 mark. What are budget builds supposed to use?

Thirdly, the new hardware, especially that of entry-level is itself incapable of running Ray Traced games natively at higher resolutions with good framerates.

It is clear that the reason of concern among the gaming community is not progress, but exclusion and unreasonable pricing.

It is not all bad, though. The progress in the fields of Machine Learning and AI has warranted certain useful features, too.

One standout feature is Upscaling. Games are rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled to a higher target resolution. The perceivable difference is negligible, if any due to improved algorithms.

Another feature is frame generation and is still in the phase of being perfected. Frame are generated by interpolating two frames and adding a generated frame.

A promising trend is the recent launch of Intel's Arc line of GPUs. In a pro-consumer move, Intel is competing at lower prices. The performance of these GPUs is impressive at the price point. This will be a welcome change in the entry level and the mid-range price ranges.