Ray Tracing-The Journey of a University alumni's findings turned essential tool for rendering movies and video games

2024 means one thing, It will be the 45th Anniversary since J. Turner Whitted gave us the immortal THE COMPLEAT ANGLER raytracing demo in 1979.

Why am I talking about Raytracing when most of my blogposts are about 2D Animation, Anime, Live-Action films, comics, etc?

It's because back in November, I've upgraded from my RTX 3060 to an RTX 4080 GPU, both which were GPUs from Nvidia that specialize in Ray-Tracing, and because as of this writing, GTA VI's trailer will be broadcast tomorrow on the internet... or was suppose to but Rockstar decided to air the trailer early in order to counter those leakers.

So instead of posting about the likes of DOUG, Popeye, Owl House, Evangelion, or the likes of these shows, I figure just to ease the tensions on GTA VI, I talk about ray tracing and how it evolved, the fights to get it to work properly in films and later video games. 

The concept of Ray Tracing involves a lot of complex math formulas that I for the life of me I can't even comprehend.

Still, you have to appreciate all the math that makes up the complexities of computer graphics.

Anyhow, the fight to get raytracing to do what you want to maintain realism has been challenged for quite a while. 

Although the 1980s and 1990s did bring us Raytraced CGI, at first they weren't even used in feature films like Toy Story or Shrek,

That's because the earliest CGI wasn't done on x86 PCs but rather Motorola 68000, MIPS or RISC systems which were far too expensive for the common user of computers to even afford at the time. And even if the hardware could handle it, it take way too long to render the hyper-realistic images needed for an 80 minute film so a lot of the raytracing was limited to Demos and short films such as this Commodore Amiga Juggler Demo seen below.

In fact, even if you think there was Raytracing in your favorite theatrical CGI films, the raytracing was faked using multiple lights to achieve that realistic look. It wasn't until later movies like Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Monster House, Despicable Me, just to name a few have started to use actual Ray Tracing in their films. Just compare a screenshot from the Original Toy Story from 1995 to another shot from 2019's Toy Story 4 and you can see how far we've advanced in rendering technology. 

I'm pretty sure people who are interested in Ray Tracing don't care much for how it's used for movies and would rather want to talk about Real-Time Raytracing instead since we reached that threshold back in 2018 with Nvidia's RTX 20 series GPUs and people would rather want to talk about the tech being used in your favorite M-Rated video games instead of tech used for a type of animation that's not allowed to be adult-oriented... save for Sausage Party and Lupin III: The First.

Up to this point, Real-Time Raytracing was infeasible due to the hardware we were stuck with.

Video games, especially on PC demanded speed and performance and to get that type of feature film quality renders in Realtime on videogames would slow down your PC to a crawl and even then, it was limited only to cutscenes or fighter reveal trailers.

And even when hardware started to show off that it's possible to do raytracing on consumer hardware, it was still too expensive for consumers so like with 80s and 90's cg animation, real-time raytracing was limited to demos and CAD or 3D Animation software packages like Autodesk Maya or Blender.

Then in September 20, 2018, everything changed with Nvidia's release of their Turing-Architecture GeForce RTX 20 series Graphics Cards.

The GPU shown above is actually my old 12GB Zotac Twin Edge RTX 3060 GPU which is an Ampere architecture GPU

I no longer use that GPU since I've upgrade to a 16GB GIGABYTE EAGLE RTX 4080 which uses the Ada Lovelace Architecture.

Suddenly, the fever dream of Real-Time Raytracing elevated into a profound reality. You could finally have movie quality visuals on your computer.... to an extent if the game in question supports RTX out of the box unless you mod your game with an RTX Reshade.

At the moment, the only game in my Maverick Warhawk PC that was optimized for RTX is ALAN WAKE 2. Makes sense since my GIGABYTE EAGLE RTX 4080 GPU came with a free download code for it..... on EPIC's Game Store instead of STEAM but hey, Free Game. 

Now, we currently are at the cusp of hardware that can do real-time raytracing with relative ease but I can hazard a guess the advancements aren't going to stop anytime soon.

At the time of this writing, we are currently at Nvidia's GeForce RTX 40 series and AMD's Radeon RX 7000 series. I didn't add Intel Arc because at the current time, it's niche and I can barely find any architecture differences since they launched back in 2022.

Anyway, I'll be sure to wait and see what the GTA 6 Trailer brings out and what the minimum requirements for a GPU will be for the PC Version though I can honestly say my GIGABYTE EAGLE RTX 4080 will handle that game like a champ so I don't need to worry. What I do know is that it will support Ray Tracing from the get go and do it far better job than GTA V did on PS5 and Xbox.

Probably because the game will be optimized for it.

Update as of May 26 2024:

I've seen the trailer but GTA 6 won't be out until Late 2025. And it will launch for PS5 and Xbox Series X first so I'll have to wait until 2026 for the PC version.

Also, while I still have my GIGABYTE EAGLE RTX 4080 GPU, I no longer use the Maverick Warhawk . I swapped out the MSI Motherboard and now I have a GIGABYTE AORUS Motherboard.

My PC is now MAVERICK FALCON 7900RT.