Ray Tracing Momentum Continues To Grow: Unreal Engine 4.22 Releases With Ray Tracing Development Tools, and New RTX Tech Demos Available Now For Download

Momentum for real-time ray tracing continues to grow with the launch of ray-traced game engines and free development tools, new ray-traced tech demos, and a DXR update for GeForce GPUs.

Unreal Engine is used by over 7.5 million developers worldwide, from those working on innovative indie games, to many of the world’s biggest franchises (see a list of games here).

Now, ray tracing development tools are available to all professional, amateur and enthusiast developers worldwide with the public release of Unreal Engine 4.22, making ray tracing more accessible and easier to implement, accelerating adoption. And that of course means more games with fabulous, immersive, real-time ray-traced visuals.

To demonstrate the power and possibilities of Unreal Engine 4.22 and its new ray tracing tools, Epic Games, Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films went to GDC 2019 and demonstrated "Troll", a ray-traced demo-stroke-film that ran in real-time on a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.

Offering a glimpse of what developers and creators can do with ray tracing running on GeForce RTX GPUs, the demo marks an unprecedented level of cinematic-quality lighting, with complex soft shadows and reflections.

“NVIDIA RTX” combines DXR ray tracing and NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling, enabling developers to craft experiences with unprecedented visual fidelity and excellent levels of performance.

Today, we’re releasing three NVIDIA RTX tech demos that demonstrate these capabilities, giving more gamers a taste of the immersive real-time visuals that developers the world over are bringing to their games, and more examples of the performance boosts offered by DLSS.

And of course, you can also check out Battlefield^TM V, Metro Exodus, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider for further cutting-edge uses of ray tracing and DLSS.

For download links for today’s new demos, and further details, keep on reading.

In early 2018, ILMxLAB, Epic Games and NVIDIA demonstrated a cinematic called Reflections. We then revealed that this was in fact rendered in real-time using ray-traced reflections, area light shadows, and ambient occlusion on a $70,000 four-GPU Volta-architecture NVIDIA DGX workstation. This was a major advancement that captured global attention, as previously real-time ray tracing at this level of fidelity had been impossible, with all ray tracing instead done offline on gigantic server farms.

Fast forward to August 2018 and the announcement of the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti at Gamescom, and now Reflections: An Unreal Engine Real-Time Ray Tracing Demonstration could run on just one GeForce RTX consumer graphics card thanks to the Turing architecture’s RT Cores that greatly accelerate ray tracing performance.

Today, we’ve released the demo for you to download and try at home. Of note, this version has been enhanced with our Deep Learning Super Sampling tech, to boost performance, and we’ve implemented new DXR updates and optimizations to further improve the quality of this stunning slice of entertainment.

Once you’ve downloaded the demo, extract the zip, open the new folder, and run ElevatorDemo.exe. For demo controls, check out the included README.txt.

Atomic Heart is a visually-arresting Unreal Engine 4-powered action game, in development at Mundfish, blending USSR-era design with robotics, creepy mannequins, and a whole load of weirdness.

This is all enhanced by advanced NVIDIA RTX Ray-Traced, Reflections and Shadows, all running at high-fidelity and accelerated with NVIDIA DLSS, creating effects and scenes that were previously impossible to render.

“RTX will change PC gaming forever. Ray tracing and DLSS make the impossible, possible.” - Robert Bagratuni, CEO, Mundfish

Now, you can download a tech demo based on the previously-released jaw-dropping footage.

Justice is one of China’s most popular MMOs, and now you can download a tech demo that demonstrates how NVIDIA RTX Ray-Traced Reflections, Shadows, and Caustics can enhance to the game’s graphics, and how NVIDIA DLSS accelerates performance.

“NVIDIA RTX real-time ray tracing and DLSS are the perfect combination. Justice can smoothly present the colorful environment brought by real-time ray tracing without additional performance cost. It makes Justice’s world even more vivid.” - Zhipeng Hu, Head of Studio/VP NetEase

Once loaded, toggle NVIDIA RTX on and off with F5, press F8 to toggle just ray tracing, and F9 to toggle DLSS.

Along with the release of real-time ray traced games like Battlefield^TM V, Metro Exodus and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the introduction of Ray Tracing in the top game engines - UE4 and Unity - is driving ray tracing momentum.