The revolution of videogame graphics
Over the years, we as players have observed how videogame graphics have become more and more advanced, going from a cartoonish-like appearance to something that is ment to resemble the real world as much as it possibly can.
In this article I will present to you a few new advanced technologies that have been used to achieve better quality of graphics in the past few years, as it is fundamental for a better perception of the game itself and a better in-depth experience for the player.
Advanced “Full ray trancing”
Full ray tracing or path trancing, is a rendering technique that has been used for more advanced and life-like light shape in-game and a more realistic global illumination, it simulates the phisical path of light, tracking millions of photon paths as they move, reflect or refract.
This tecnique offers an even more realistic view of 3d models as we see them in a game scene, that way, materials like glass, water or any reflective surface appears to be actually reflecting and more natural.
How can i play games with path tracing?
To use this tecnology, the hardware that is used to be able to access path tracing has to be quite strong, because tracking millions of photons can be incredibly demanding.
It is required to use RT cores or AI Upscaling technology graphic cards, like DLSS that utilize neural rendering to reconstruct high-resolution images from lower-resolution, ray-traced inputs, making realtime full ray tracing viable.
An example of a videogame that supports path tracing in it is Cyberpunk 2077.
Neutral upscaling
Neutral uspcaling in videogames uses artificial intelligence to render frames at a lower internal resolution and then intelligently reconstruct them for high-resolution displays. The AI network is trained on massive datasets and temporal data, that way instead of stretching pixels it predicts missing pixels in real time and adds them up.
The benefit of that is that rendering at a lower resolution using neutral upscaling to enhance it takes drastically less GPU workload, resulting to a gigantic boost on in-game FPS.
The biggest tecnologies developed to host this technique are INVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and INTEL XeSS, these have been rivals between each other for a long time.
We can come to a conclusion, that in the latest years the use of AI that has been implemented in both of these tecniques.
It had spread widely and in the future more and more videogame companies, or simply those producing graphic cards, are going to rely more on AI to be able to utilize better graphics at a more affordable price and less workload on the GPU.
