Using software and hardware ray tracing

Ray tracing is a new way of rendering the contents of a scene, and one that allows us to achieve much more realistic results than were possible in the past with regard to lighting a scene. This type of technology has only been recently introduced in game engines, as it was traditionally too costly to implement in real-time environments. As a result, this technique has often been attributed to offline renderers such as the ones used in the animation industry or professional architectural visualization studios. The arrival of hardware-accelerated ray tracing graphics cards and new rendering solutions such as Lumen has enabled game studios and real-time graphics developers to tap into the potential of ray tracing, for calculating more realistic reflections, refraction, ambient occlusion, lighting, and shadows.

In this recipe, we are going to study how to implement several types of ray tracing solutions to achieve more realistic reflections, exploring...