The Impact of Ray Tracing in Video Game Graphic

Peacock Scholarship

Public Deposited

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to examine the effect of ray tracing in video game graphics from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The quantitative research measures the changes in rendering time caused by ray tracing, and the qualitative research measures how much of an impact ray tracing had on the individual player experience. This was a blind study that took note of whether the effect was noticeable to the individual subjects and how their experience may have been impacted by it both positively and negatively. The results of these studies were that ray tracing had the greatest impact on the player experience in scenarios where it was deployed to a heavy degree either in the form of full path tracers or an extensive suite of individual effects, however, this comes with the downside that heavier ray tracing implementations are too computationally expensive to be feasibly put to use on widely adopted consumer hardware such as this current generation of game consoles. Our recommendation to game developers in the present is to implement ray tracing in ways that refine the visual design of a game and reduce artifacts caused by rasterization, and then, once hardware available at an affordable price point advances enough to support extensive ray tracing implementations, the new graphics technology should be fully embraced.

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