GDC 2018: Microsoft Announces DirectX Raytracing.

Game developers use all kinds of tricks in order to make their games run as smooth and as efficiently as possible. For the last thirty years games have used a technique known as Rasterization that renders 3D objects.

In order to make this efficient, when rendering in real-time, developers use something known as occlusion culling in order to only render 3D objects that can be seen by the camera. The best example of this is from the developers of Horizon Zero Dawn.

 Microsoft are returning to another method of rendering known as Raytracing, this is the method of generating an image by tracing the path of light and what it encounters. While this is not a new rendering method it has been largely unfeasible due to it being extremely demanding and inefficient for rendering in real-time.

DirectX Raytracing aims to change this by using dedicated hardware acceleration that can be integrated with already existing DirectX 12 content. By using a mixture of Rasterization and Raytracing developers will have a much larger scope to work with. You can read about the details in a lengthy blog post here.