Unless you're a physicist, you probably don't pay too much mind to the function of light in your daily life. Light is light, right? When there is light, we see, and when there isn't, we don't. But ...

Ray tracing and path tracing are two of the most exciting and demanding dynamic lighting techniques available to gamers and game developers in 2024. They both represent a massive leap in realism over ...

Ray tracing, a sophisticated technique for drawing realistic graphics in video games, has gone mainstream. Today it's even available on entry-level graphics hardware. Computers are my lifelong ...

Real-time path tracing, the next stage of game rendering, is on the horizon, Nvidia says. But wait--didn't RTX just get here? So what is path tracing, how is it different from ray tracing, and why ...

Ray tracing and path tracing sound similar — and technically, they are. Both methods simulate how light travels in a 3D environment, but the way they work and the results they produce are completely ...

Every few years, it seems like there's an amazing new technology with the promise of making games look ever more realistic. Over the decades, we've had shaders, tessellation, shadow mapping, ray ...