The search for photorealism has been the driving force behind the electronic games industry in recent decades. If before we were content with simple polygons and blurred textures, today we demand perfect reflexes e dynamic shadows that imitate real life.
Thus, new technologies with technical terms appear and confuse the consumer, being the difference between Ray Tracing and Path Tracing one of the most common questions among PC Games and modern console enthusiasts.
Although both technologies have the same objective of simulating the behavior of light, they operate at different levels of complexity and visual fidelity. Understanding this distinction helps you adjust expectations about your hardware’s performance and the graphics quality you’ll see on your screen.
The basics: what came before? Understanding rasterization
To understand innovation, we need to look at the industry standard: rasterization. The technique, used since the early days of 3D games, projects three-dimensional objects onto a 2D screen (your monitor). Lighting is nothing more than a magic trick.
Developers create pre-calculated shadow maps and position artificial lights that do not physically interact with the environment.
In rasterization, if a puddle of water reflects a building, it is because the game creator programmed that reflection specifically for that angle.
If you move the camera and look at something that is not rendered on the screen (outside the field of view), the reflection disappears or becomes incorrect. It’s efficient, fast, but limited.
Ray Tracing: the hybrid step
The technology of Ray Tracing (Ray Tracing) arrived to solve the limitations of rasterization, but in current games, it generally operates in a hybrid way.
Titles like Control or Metro Exodus They use rasterization for most of the scene and apply Ray Tracing only to specific elements, such as:
- Reflexes: mirrored surfaces or water.
- Shadows: smoother, more realistic contours.
- Ambient Occlusion: how light behaves in corners and crevices.
In this modelthe GPU (video card) dShoots lightning from the player’s camera. When these rays hit an object, the system calculates the color and lighting of that specific point.
It’s a giant leap in quality, but still retains a foothold in old techniques to save performance.
Path Tracing: the complete simulation
O Path Tracingoften called by NVIDIA “Full Ray Tracing“, is the natural and brutal evolution of this technology.
Unlike the hybrid method, Path Tracing attempts to render the entire scene by simulating the physics of light. It doesn’t choose reflections or shadows, it calculates everything in real time.
The technique uses an algorithm (usually Monte Carlo) to fire thousands of rays that bounce multiple times off objects in the scene. Think of a ray of light coming through a window, hitting the red floor, reflecting off the white wall (which takes on a pinkish hue) and finally reaching your eyes.
Path Tracing calculates this entire bounce trajectory simultaneously.
Main features of Path Tracing:
- Unified Global Lighting: there is no distinction between shadows, reflections and lights. Everything is a consequence of the behavior of the rays.
- Computational cost: It requires massive processing power, making it unplayable without the aid of artificial intelligence.
- Loyalty: is the technique used in Pixar films and Hollywood special effects, now applied in real time.
Direct comparison
| Feature | Ray Tracing (Hybrid) | Path Tracing (Completo) |
|---|---|---|
| Rendering | Mix rasterization with selective rays | Uses lightning for almost all lighting |
| Light Calculation | Limited to specific effects (shadows/reflections) | Simulates multiple light ricochets (bounces) |
| Performance | Heavy, but viable on consoles and mid-range PCs | Extremely heavy, requires high-end GPUs |
| Examples | Spider-Man 2, Resident Evil 4 | Cyberpunk 2077 (Overdrive), Portal RTX |
The weight on hardware and the solution via AI
Run native Path Tracing on 4K resolution it would bring even the most powerful graphics card to its knees, running at a few frames per second.
The viability of this technology depends entirely on image reconstruction techniques, such as DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) da NVIDIA, o FSR da AMD e o XeSS da Intel.
In the case of Cyberpunk 2077 in Overdrive mode, for example, artificial intelligence not only increases resolution, but also helps fill in the information “holes” left by light rays, through technologies such as Ray Reconstruction.
This allows you to deliver a clean and fluid image where, mathematically, pure hardware could not.
Also read:
The future of lighting in games
While consoles like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X have brought ray tracing to the masses, path tracing is still largely the province of high-performance PC games.
The trend is that, with the advancement of GPU architectures and the optimization of AI algorithms, the line between movies and games will completely disappear in the coming years, making simulated lighting the new industry standard.
Source(s): NVIDIA (1), (2) and (3)
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Source: https://www.adrenaline.com.br/nvidia/ray-tracing-path-tracing-diferenca/
