While real-time ray tracing is a tech that NVIDIA is currently trying to push, it appears that the first triple-A game that will require a Ray Tracing graphics card will not be coming out anytime soon. According to NVIDIA’s Morgan McGuire, the first triple-A game that will not run on non-Ray Tracing GPUs will be released in 2023 (which is four years from now).

https://twitter.com/CasualEffects/status/1155567500861440000

Until then, Morgan McGuire claims that most games will be using a ray tracing/rasterizing co-exist method for their visuals. This method is used in most current-gen games that take advantage of RTX, such as Control, Metro: Exodus, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and all the upcoming triple-A games like Watch_Dogs Legion, Cyberpunk 2077 and Doom Eternal.

In 2024, McGuire believes that a truly hybrid ray tracing/rasterizing system will be implemented in video-games. This hybrid solution will offer area light shadows, ambient occlusion, glossy reflections, rays for data structures, ray traced audio, perfect particle collisions and perfect AI visibility.

McGuire predicts that this hybrid solution will be used until 2034 as game developers will be then be able to move to a truly Path Tracing solution/system. This means that, if everything goes according to McGuire’s predictions, we’ll have full path tracing triple-A games in 2035.

It will be really interesting to see whether we’ll get a triple-A game that will require a ray tracing GPU in 2023. After all, both the next Playstation and Xbox consoles will be out by then and we already know that both of them will support hardware-accelerated ray tracing effects!