As we’ve said numerous times, we believe that ray-tracing is the future of lighting in video-games. While there have been some attempts in various tech demos to implement a fully ray-tracing rendering system, we haven’t seen any triple-A game featuring it. And from the looks of it, we won’t see such a thing anytime soon. According to NVIDIA’s president in Brasil, Richard Cameron, we need 100 times more powerful graphics cards to achieve this.
As Richard told TecMundo regarding the future of PC gaming, we need 100 times more powerful GPUs for real-time ray-tracing. In addition, Richard claimed that for photorealistic virtual reality we need 40 times more powerful GPUs.
“In order to achieve ray tracing in games, the GPU must have 100 times the processing power it has today. To have virtual reality, you need 40 times more powerful GPUs.”
Now while VR is possible today in video-games, Richard is talking about photo-realistic graphics. As Richard concluded, when the hardware is ready, players will put on their VR glasses, play and cannot distinguish the real from the virtual.
In other words, PC gaming has not reached its peak yet. However, it will be interesting to see whether NVIDIA will keep pushing the boundaries, especially now that AMD seems unable to compete with them. Will the green team invest on more powerful hardware each and every year, or will it slow down?
