Ray tracing has been added to Fortnite, causing many players to wonder what exactly ray tracing is. In this article, we'll give you a brief overview of this complicated topic.
The first thing to know is that, for now, ray tracing will only be available on PC, and only with certain types of graphics cards. You'll need an Nvidia RTX card that can handle ray tracing, and you'll need to run the game on DirectX 12, which Fortnite currently has as an option in graphics settings.
What is ray tracing?
The simplest way to describe ray tracing is a more realistic way of rendering light and shadow in a video game. Traditionally, ray tracing has been used in movies and television shows to produce incredibly realistic lighting in computer-generated scenes. The reason there has been visual effects stability in movies, but not in games, is because of the rendering differences. Movie scenes can be rendered over time, using powerful equipment, while games are limited to the material available to the consumer and the need to render everything in real time.
The result is that games have relied on a process called rasterization to display three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional screen. The process is faster and easier to render than ray tracing. It can be used to give a reasonably accurate, and often very pretty, approximation of the behavior of light and shadow in a scene. For a more in-depth explanation of how rasterization works, I suggest this great article from TechSpot. Be advised. It's very technically dense.
Where ray tracing differs is that it seeks to reproduce the correct behavior of light in 3D space. At its most basic level, ray tracing is the ability to trace light from the
