Unreal Engine gets support for real-time ray tracing on March 26

Epic will officially support real-time ray tracing with Unreal Engine 4.22 starting March 26, the company announced at the Game Developer Conference. There, Nvidia, Epic and Microsoft also announced a DXR Spotlight competition for game developers.

Epic already supports real-time ray tracing in preview with the Unreal Engine, but as of March 26, support for DirectX12’s DXR technology is final, allowing the claimed six million developers who use the engine to deploy the techniques. Simultaneously with the announcement, the company unveiled a new demo made with Unreal Engine 4.22 called Troll. Unity will integrate experimental support for real-time ray tracing in early April, followed by preview access in Unity version 2019.03.

Nvidia, Epic and Microsoft are calling on developers to enter their creations made with the Unreal Engine 4.22 into a DXR Spotlight competition. Anyone who makes the most beautiful demos with reflections, shadows or lighting effects based on real-time ray tracing is eligible for an Nvidia RTX Titan.

Nvidia also announced the arrival of Creator Ready drivers. These are intended for developers and appear alongside the regular Game Ready drivers. Version 419.67 will be available on Thursday and provides optimizations for Unreal Engine 4.22, Autodesk Arnold 5.3, Redcine-x Pro 51, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC and Adobe Substance Designer, among others. The drivers are intended for RTX, GTX and Titan cards with Turing GPU, the Titan V with Volta GPU, GTX and Titan cards with Pascal GPU and recent Quadro cards.