Ray tracing articles

Control is the latest game from the makers of Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break. It's all the standard elements of a regular third-person shooter, but its exhaustive world building and all-consuming eeriness make it much more.

In this second part of our deeper look at 3D game rendering, we'll be focusing what happens to the 3D world after all of the vertex processing has finished. We'll need to dust off our math textbooks again, grapple with the geometry of frustums, and ponder the puzzle of perspectives. We'll also take a quick dive into the physics of ray tracing, lighting and materials -- excellent!

During this year's GDC, Nvidia announced that GTX graphics cards would be getting basic ray tracing support with a driver update. For putting together this test we took the most powerful Pascal GPU we had on hand - the Nvidia Titan X - and pitted it against Nvidia's RTX line-up in the three games that support ray tracing thus far.

Critically-acclaimed game Shadow of the Tomb Raider has been updated to receive support for both DirectX ray tracing shadows and Nvidia's DLSS upscaling technology. It's been seven months since ray tracing was shown off in this title and a good six months since the game was released, but hey, the feature was added in eventually and it's a very good game, we must add.

It's time for us to talk about ray tracing once again, this time in Metro Exodus, the latest game to integrate support for Nvidia's RTX technology. Metro Exodus looks to be a better showcase for DXR as a slower paced, open-world shooter that uses ray-traced global illumination. The game is launching with ray tracing and DLSS support from day one.