Unreal Engine adds support for raytracing

Few games are supporting DirectX Raytracing. A new version of UE 4 offers support for DirectX Raytracing (DXR). Unreal Engine is a popular game development software kit from Epic and version 4.2.2 allows developers to incorporate raytracing into their games.

Specifically, it concerns raytracing effects for reflections, shadows, light, ambient occlusion and more. As far as current raytracing-supported games are concerned, all is rather limited. For the time being, only Battlefield V offers support for DXR as well as Metro: Exodus that launches today. With a new version of Unreal Engine 4 it should be easier for these developers to add the raytracing technique in games. The announcement does not come as a surprise, however: Epic announced the feature for Unreal Engine in November last year and already showed some images and concepts at the time.

The patch notes state:

Added ray tracing low level support.

• Implemented a low level layer on top of UE DirectX 12 that provides support for DXR and allows creating and using ray tracing shaders (ray generation shaders, hit shaders, etc) to add ray tracing effects.
  • Added high-level ray tracing features
  • Rect area lights
  • Soft shadows
  • Reflections
  • Reflected shadows
  • Ambient occlusion
  • RTGI (real time global illumination)
  • Translucency
  • Clearcoat
  • IBL
  • Sky
  • Geometry types Triangle meshes
    • Static
    • Skeletal (Morph targets & Skin cache)
    • Niagara particles support
  • Texture LOD
  • Denoiser
• Shadows, Reflections, AO
• Path Tracert
  Unbiased, full GI path tracer for making ground truth reference renders inside UE4.