Explain Like I'm Five

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ELI5 What is Ray Tracing? And is it really that much of a game changer in video games? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 days ago (1 children)

ray tracing mimics the way light bounces around on surfaces in real time. it does this by tracing rays from light sources in game and colouring the objects they hit. the rays then "bounce" off of the objects and redo the same step of colouring. this needs to be done for every pixel you can see.

in regards to it changing video games: idk, how much do you care about lighting?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

Something quite important to keep in mind is that this is nothing new, there have been raytracers since at least the 70s. However, they were never anywhere near real time. A simple scene with just a few simple objects could take hours to render.

That it is now possible to do with much more complex meshes, more lighting and much higher resolution and also many times per second shows how much faster (and specialised) the hardware has become.