UPDATE: Ray tracing confirmed for The Medium

It’s a lighting technique that makes the lighting much better.

1 Like

phew, crisis averted.

Raytracing traces rays form objects in a scene to lights and other objects in the scene to determine exact lighting and shadowing values.

1 Like

basically, it’s this. There have been mainly two paradigms of rendering, Rasterization and Ray tracing (or more broadly, Path tracing). In simple terms, rasterization is a highly gimped version of rendering. Unlike real life, it isn’t shooting light rays and calculating bounces, as a result it suffers a lot at reflections and dynamic changes in lighting which is why it requires use of approximations and workarounds to get a fairly realistic look (most common being light probes). But rasterization is not built around accuracy, but speed. This is why games and real-time applications have always been built on rasterization and will continue to do so. You dont’ care as much about accuracy as wanting 30 fps or 60 or 120.

On the other side, there is ray tracing, which as the name suggests, a bunch of light rays are actually shot onto the scene and bounced around, which is more in line with what happens in real life when you cast a light onto something. This makes it more realistic, as the shadow areas are not completely dark because bounced light fill them up to a degree. Because it’s aimed at accuracy, it’s incredibly time consuming. This is why ray tracing is the primary form of rendering in vfx, archviz and other industries aiming for accurate light bounce representation (also referred to as offline rendering in these industries) over real time applications like rasterization (online rendering).

Now, why the sudden interest in ray tracing for games? Real-time global illumination has been one of the main goals of game rendering, and raytracing is one of the prominent ways to achieve it. Because ray tracing has been the domain of accuracy over performance, games have historically just evaded using it. A few years ago, Nvidia would release RTX cards which had dedicated hardware to specifically do raytracing tasks and boost its performance to a great degree, to the point of doing the ray tracing in real time. But because they had to calculate light rays, they had to develop several algorithms to counteract problems that come with raytracing, most common being noise.

Despite the marketing, RTX doesn’t kick out rasterization in favor of RT. Instead, it’s a hybrid of rasterization (for the majority of rendering work) and just uses the RT cores to add raytraced reflections and some lighting perks to make the game look more realistic. This creates a lot of noise, so they developed very clever denoising algorithms to clean up the mess those raytraced rays create. Raytracing was bound to come to games, it’s just a natural evolution of game developers wanting to leave behind the above mentioned excruciating optimization tasks, light probes, baking and other shit that rasterization has always needed to do. Rasterization techniques will still have a mainstay, but with raytracing, real time global illumination is easier to do, and more dynamic.

Now with all that said, The Medium is gonna be using Microsoft’s DXR (DirectX Raytracing), which is Microsoft’s backend for raytracing, much like OptiX is for RTX cards.

2 Likes

Great. Superb news. Well done Bloober for getting ahead of this. Looking forward to playing this game.

1 Like

So glad I did not reply in the thread before the update …

2 Likes

It’s a way to simplify how lighting works for image rendering.

A light source emits light in all sort of directions, that are bounced almost infinitely until it reaches our eyes, but even the ones we are not seeing are being bounced around.

Since that would be night impossible to compute raytracing goes the other way around it starts from the camera’s view and calculate how the rays bounce around the scene up until they reach the light source. For real time raytracing there’s even more optimization: instead of reaching all the way to the light source they just bounce until it reaches a surface directly lit by a light source (the first light hit is pretty cheap to calculate nowadays and used extensively in games) and iterate over that in time, for example in the first frame the raytracing would determine just the 1st indirect bounce. But that information is buffered so on the next frame another surface that was in the shadow would now be indirectly light and so on. (some games does not buffer the results but calculate the first or second bounce every time).

Anyway, it’s basically a super optimized way of simulating how light bounces around the scene and provides more accurate lighting, shadows and reflections. And can also be used to simulate other waves like sound so you can actually simulate how sound propagates too.

Edit: Should have scrolled before posting XD I see this was explained already

3 Likes

Well, what do you know, it was all for nothing. Good to have a confirmation, though.

What great news!! I knew it had to be a mistake. Honestly cant wait to play it.

Hopefully people will stop having knee jerk reactions :slight_smile:

Misinformation being spread can damage a games sales.

Not too interested in this game myself, but I hope this a good game for those that enjoy the genre :slight_smile:

Great news!

We wouldn’t be gamers then lol

To overreact is in our DNA :joy:

1 Like

Gee maybe it’s wise to not flip out over a potential website typo.

Hope all the concern that was displayed all over the gaming community about this is now resolved

1 Like

There was never any worry to be had about DXR on the Series X

This video is over 5 months old, so hoping to see an update on this one at some point, and shows full path tracing

Yall hilarious… It wouldn’t be disastrous even if they did remove raytracing. Not like any of yall paid money for anything yet. :doge:

Just shows how eager people are to jump on and bash anything Xbox related, even a simple website display error caused a huge up roar all over the internet

1 Like

Well, I expect people here to be more relaxed and wait for official confirmation on stuff and not go jn doom and gloom mode.

1 Like

I was hoping this forum would be a haven from alarmist posting but I guess there is no avoiding it.

Excellent! Really looking forward to this one.

Well this forum acted better than others on this issue at least.

That’s a relief. Ray-Tracing or not, Medium is gonna look great and be awesome, but nice to hear it can look even better