During its keynote at GDC 2019, NVIDIA made many announcements, with its proprietary RTX ray-tracing being a major topic of conversation throughout. Besides promising GeForce GTX graphics cards owners access to the feature, video game developer Unity Technologies (Unity) announced that it would soon be integrating support for NVIDIA’s RTX technology into its self-titled Unity engine.
The partnership between NVIDIA and Unity is interesting from several angles. For starters, and stating the obvious, adding ray-tracing to the Unity engine means that the game developer is now able to produce and render ultra high-resolution 3D objects. With an even greater depth of realism.
More importantly, integrating and baking NVIDIA’s RTX technology into its game engine now give it an edge against its direct competitor; Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. For the record, Epic Games had already announced that its Unreal Engine 4.22 would carry support for ray-tracing. Unity’s adoption of the technology simply puts them on even footing.
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At the moment, the technology is only available to a select number of Unity users in “Production-focused” industries. Translated, that means that the API is currently being used by individuals working in production houses and companies, such as BMW.
(Source: NVIDIA via Ars Technica, TechCrunch, TechSpot // Image: TechCrunch)
