GDC focuses on ray tracing
GDC 2026 in San Francisco is focusing on cutting-edge topics like path tracing in NVIDIA Zorah and advanced ray-traced lighting techniques in games such as Star Wars Outlaws and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle [https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/path-tracing-nanite-in-nvidia-zorah-presented-by-nvidia/911196, https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/the-magic-behind-ray-traced-lighting-in-star-wars-outlaws-presented-by-nvidia/911198, https://schedule.gdconf.com/session/advanced-graphics-summit-path-tracing-deep-dive-indiana-jones-and-the-great-circle/910009].
Ray tracing's roots go back to 1979, but it demanded immense processing power, making real-time use impossible until recently. NVIDIA's Turing architecture in 2018 was a key step, bringing ray tracing to mass-market applications like video games. The NVIDIA RTX 50 series GPUs power many of the ray tracing advancements, including those seen in the "Zorah" demo. "Zorah," a 108GB download built for Unreal Engine 5, showcases the "Blackwell" architecture and its neural rendering capabilities. It features nearly half a billion triangles per scene and over 30,000 materials. Ray tracing simulates light interaction with objects, creating realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections. Path tracing, also known as full ray tracing, is a demanding rendering method used by visual effects artists. While visually impressive, ray tracing significantly impacts GPU performance, potentially reducing frames per second (FPS) by 50% or more. The performance hit can be anywhere from 22% to 50%, and even higher depending on the implementation. However, Microsoft is testing DirectX ray tracing updates that could boost performance by 40-90%. Games like "Star Wars Outlaws" and "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" are pushing ray tracing technology. "Indiana Jones and the Great Circle" requires hardware-based ray tracing. "Star Wars Outlaws" uses some form of shader-based always-on ray tracing. Enabling ray tracing can expose the need for high-end hardware and technologies like NVIDIA's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) to offset performance costs. DLSS uses AI to output higher resolution frames from a lower resolution input. Ray tracing presents game developers with challenges, including balancing visual fidelity with performance and managing increased development complexity. Developers may need to create separate versions of a game for different hardware capabilities. NVIDIA is previewing new RTX Mega Geometry foliage systems at GDC 2026 to address challenges in rendering large natural environments with real-time ray tracing.
