Ray Tracing

A computer graphics rendering technique that simulates real-world lighting by simulating light rays being emitted. The rendering starts from the camera and then outward. The result is an image with real-world lighting. This method takes a lot of processing power. It can take a long time to render a single frame on low to mid-end computers.

Ever since NVIDIA released their RTX GPUs, real-time ray tracing is possible now. This caused ray tracing to increase in popularity and is now used in some video games such as Minecraft and Quake II RTX. Due to ray tracing requiring a lot of power, this is only available for high-end GPUs (high-end GeForce or 20 series).

Ray tracing has all of the features in modern game graphics but has much more accurate and real-world like lighting:
Ambient occlusion
Godrays
High quality reflections (phong falls under this too)
High quality shadows
Soft shadows

This game looks really good with ray tracing.
I used ray tracing to render my film.

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Ray Tracing

Something which breaks GPUs

person1: Dude have you tried Minecraft with ray tracing?
person2: Yeah, my GPU had a meltdown!

Ray-traced head

The gaming term for a light reflection beaming off a bald mans head.

Hey Jeff, have you seen the new math teacher? He’s got a ray-traced head.