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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Practical Techniques for Ray Tracing in Games (Presented by Imagination Technologies)
Speaker(s): Gareth Morgan, Jesper Mortensen
Company Name(s): Imagination Technologies, Unity
Track / Format: Programming

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Overview: Ray tracing has, for many years, been the gold standard of visual realism in 3D rendering. Thanks to advances in modern graphics hardware, ray tracing is now a feasible technique for use in games. This presentation will describe how ray tracing has been successfully integrated into the Unity engine and combined with traditional rasterized 3D graphics. Accurate shadow rendering is a key component of visual realism. Ray traced shadows can provide good performance, accurate penumbra, and they avoid some of the artifacts and pitfalls of shadow maps and shadow volumes. Reflections are an obvious application for ray tracing in games. Reflections and refractions off irregularly shaped objects can add an element of realism that is difficult to achieve any other way. This session will cover the technical details of how these effects are blended into the Unity engine's rendering pipeline without sacrificing real time frame rate.

GDC 2014

Gareth Morgan

Imagination Technologies

Jesper Mortensen

Unity

free content

Programming

Programming