New developer version of Unreal Engine includes support for ray tracing

Epic Games has made the Preview 1 version of Unreal Engine 4.22 available to developers. This version, which will be released prior to the final release, includes support for real-time ray tracing.

Epic, through contributor Victor Lerp, has announced that the preview release has support for an early access version of real-time ray tracing and path tracing. The addition of ray tracing is the main part of the rendering updates of the new Unreal Engine version.

The ray tracing implementation is made up of two components: a “layer” of real-time ray tracing in the form of a layer that comes on top of the DirectX 12 implementation in the engine, which allows the use or addition of ray tracing shaders and ray tracing effects. The update’s description also states that a ‘high level’ of ray tracing has also been added, enabling soft shadows, reflections and real-time global illumination, among other things.

With this support for ray tracing, Epic capitalizes on the possibilities that Nvidia offers with the RTX video cards. These cards feature special RT cores for ray tracing. Nvidia has released several videos showing the capabilities of ray tracing in scenes running on Unreal Engine 4. So there are versions of the engine that already have ray tracing support, but now that is also available to a much wider group of developers.

This ray tracing support is not exclusive to the Unreal Engine. Developer Dice makes it possible to play Battlefield 5 including ray tracing with a recent version of its Frostbite engine. Nvidia showed off its ray tracing technology in the game Shadow of the Tomb Raider in August last year, but an update that introduces support for it for players is yet to come.