Sweeney: Ray tracing needs 25 teraflops

A lot has been written about ray tracing but it looks like we're finally nearing territory where game developers can incorporate real-time ray tracing in video games. In a recent interview with MCVUK magazine, Tim Sweeney from Epic Games said that at around 25 teraflops of computing power, ray tracing becomes the best method to make realistic looking graphics. He suggested game studios should definitely think about it for new AAA projects. At the moment, the computing horsepower isn't quite there yet, but give it a couple more years and this becomes very realistic. It seems this may even become a key feature of the next-gen video game consoles.

It turns out that at around 25 teraflops operations per second, ray tracing becomes the best way to produce realistic looking pixels.

The demo we showed in partnership with ILMxLab is the first step in that direction. Part of the scene is rendered and part is ray traced, all the shadows and reflections come from ray tracing, and like movies, game engines are going to adopt this.

You’re going to see more and more ray-traced elements in our scenes, and I think ten years from now you might find nothing but ray tracing in our engines. Everybody who’s starting a triple-A project, they all should be thinking about ray tracing.

Via: WCCF Tech