Raytracing, or for us in specific, DirectX Raytracing is going to be a popular topic for the times to come. NVIDIA just announced their GeForce 2070, 2080 and 2080 Ti with Raytracing cores. Meanwhile, some time ago Futuremark announced a Raytracing version of Time Spy. As it now looks, it'll be released next month.

Back then at GDC Microsoft's announcement of DirectX Raytracing coincided with the UL announcement. DirectX Raytracing (DXR) is a new feature in DirectX 12 that opens the door to a new class of real-time graphics techniques for games.

UL (Not Futuremark anymore) now spreads word that the raytracing enabled benchmark will be released with the launch of Redstone 5. Redstone 5 is the Microsoft Fall 2018 OS update, which is expected to arrive late September and will include the DirectX Raytracing libraries.

Practical real-time raytracing for games

Raytracing is not a new technique, but until recently it has been too computationally demanding to use in real-time games. With modern GPUs, it's now possible to use rasterization for most of the rendering and a smaller amount of raytracing to enhance shadows, reflections, and other effects that are difficult to achieve with traditional techniques. The DXR tech demo runs in real-time on current GPU hardware and, because it builds on existing methods, it was relatively easy to implement into the DirectX 12 game engine.