Now it's GTA 5 and Witcher 3's turn to get the ray-tracing treatment
Ray tracing is the hot new thing in video game graphics – so hot in fact that Sony’s already announced the PlayStation 5 will be capable of it. So we’re starting to see existing games with the tech enabled – with impressive results.
Digital Foundry has already reported on Half-Life 2, Minecraft and Crysis with ray tracing enabled. But I wanted to point to a couple of videos that show what Grand Theft Auto 5 and The Witcher 3 look like with ray tracing.
First up we have Grand Theft Auto 5 with ray tracing. You can really see the improvement in lighting in Rockstar’s open world epic, particularly with the car parked under the freeway. I also love what it does to the house interior – the tables look fantastic!
Grand Theft Auto V Ray tracing Global Illumination Demo Watch on YouTube
Now on to The Witcher 3. Here, I think the ray tracing effect is more subtle than it is with GTA 5. But I can certainly notice a more realistic, almost subdued lighting effect with the tech enabled.
The Witcher 3 | ReShade Ray Tracing by Marty McFly Watch on YouTube
As Digital Foundry has reported, these ray tracing videos are possible because of a new extension currently in development for the powerful post-process injection tool, Reshade, created by modding veteran and Nvidia Ancel contributor, Pascal Gilcher.
From DF:
“Reshade works by hooking into DirectX, accessing the data contained in the depth and colour buffers to accomplish a range of post-process effects, including SMAA anti-aliasing, screen-space reflections, depth of field and colour tints to name but a few. A new ray tracing feature is now available in alpha builds – and strictly speaking, this adds a new layer of global illumination derived from path tracing. It’s not a full fat implementation as we saw in Minecraft, but it can have a transformative effect – particularly on titles like the original Crysis, created at a time when the way games were lit was somewhat naïve compared to modern day implementations.”
