Ray tracing technology was a hot topic at GDC this year, with several developers and designers speaking about the many, many advantages it provides. Both NVidia’s Volta GPUs and Microsoft’s DXR API will be making use of ray tracing, while 4A Games’ Metro: Exodus will also be doing the same. According to legendary developer Tim Sweeney, known for founding Epic Games and creating the Unreal Engine, all future AAA games should be following suit.

“It turns out that at around 25 teraflops operations per second, ray tracing becomes the best way to produce realistic looking pixels,” Sweeney said while speaking with MCVUK. “The demo we showed in partnership with ILMxLab is the first step in that direction. Part of the scene is rendered and part is ray traced, all the shadows and reflections come from ray tracing, and like movies, game engines are going to adopt this. You’re going to see more and more ray-traced elements in our scenes, and I think ten years from now you might find nothing but ray tracing in our engines. Everybody who’s starting a triple-A project, they all should be thinking about ray tracing.”

And when exactly might this technology become more common? Sweeney believes that within as little as two years, we might be seeing single GPU units with that kind of computing power. “It’s not coming to your smartphone anytime soon,” he said. “But GPUs move fast. You might find within two years that you have that amount of computing power in a single GPU. And suddenly it becomes possible at high-end.”

So could we possibly see something along these lines when the PS5 and the next Xbox inevitably come around? Seeing as they would probably be launching around some time in 2021 (or 2022, at the latest), that definitely seems likely. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more similar coverage.

Thanks, WCCFTech!

The rapidity with which technology for graphics has advanced over the last few years is a bit dizzying. Graphics continue to get better and better, and especially with the advent of sophisticated tech, such as DirectX 12, Vulkan, and virtual reality, it is clear that we are fast approaching photorealism in our rendered graphics.

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games, the makers of the Unreal Engine, which remains the most popular middleware solution for most game developers, agrees that we are almost there- though he does think that we are a ways off from achieving total and true photorealism.

“You know, we’re getting to the point now where we can render photo-realistic static scenes without humans with static lighting,” Sweeney said in an interview with Gamespot. “Today’s hardware can do that, so part of that problem is solved. Getting to the point of photo-realistic dynamic environments, especially with very advanced shading models like wet scenes, or reflective scenes, or anisotropic paint, though…maybe forty Teraflops is the level where we can achieve all of that.”

This sounds reasonable, of course- in any consideration such as this, one must balance Moore’s Law with the law of diminishing returns. Even as technology continues to get better, one will need ever more resources from a technological perspective to achieve the same amount of perceptible growth.

Even so- 40 TFLOPs and true photorealism may almost be here. I can’t wait to see how graphics tech evolves over the next decade or so.

Earlier this week, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney had some rather harsh things to say about Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform. The harshest of all was when he said that the UWP, “can, should, must, and will die.” It appears that Sweeney believes that the UWP is something that is actually a kind of move against the entire PC gaming industry in particular. He also wants the company to open the platform up for all developers and it’s this comment that seemed to spur Microsoft’s Phil Spencer to action.

The Xbox One chief posted his response on Twitter saying, “Windows has always been an open ecosystem welcoming the contributions of hardware and software partners, and will always continue to be. UWP is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, and can be supported by any store. Broad range of tools. We will discuss our next steps with the Universal Windows Platform at //build later this month.”

When Spencer was asked specifically how he felt about the comments Sweeney made, he seemed to be looking to be reconciliatory. He started the response by saying that Tim Sweeney is a friend and “he pushes for what he believes. I agree UWP has to be open and that’s what we are doing.”

However, since then, Sweeney ‘s overall fears and concerns have seemingly been based off of incomplete information. Firstly, Sweeney admitted on a podcast with Polygon that there’s no proof that Microsoft has an evil plan of sorts with UWP. “Microsoft is a black box. I know a lot of people there who are really awesome, smart people who want to do the right thing, but then there are other people there who appear not to be because some of the bad decisions they’re making on Windows 10. There is not proof of an evil plan to do this, but just the fear.”

It was on Twitter where the responses started coming in. When told that Windows 10 has been able to side-load apps since November 2015, Sweeney said, “Yes, am using Windows 10. Will need a couple days to document the win32 vs UWP develop/deploy/install differences in openness.”

Which is kind of weird when you consider his fears about Win32 applications being left out to dry while also stating that he needed time to really analyze the differences between the openness Win32 and UWP.

Furthermore, Sweeney said that he and Microsoft had been speaking privately about UWP for 18 months prior to this…and yet he liked Xbox boss Phil Spencer’s response on the openness of UWP. “I like the sound of this, and look forward to thorough technical details on UWP’s planned openness at //build.”

Something doesn’t quite fit in the midst of all this. What are your thoughts on Sweeney’s views? Let us know in the comments.

Note: GamingBolt’s Oliver VanderVoot also contributed to this article.

Leaving aside the fact that Epic Games sold off the Gears of War license to Microsoft and is generally cooperative with the latter, Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney recently expressed his concerns about Windows 8 to Polygon, especially regarding the operating system’s closed nature compared to the likes of Steam Machines.

“I genuinely worry about the future of Microsoft. They’ve locked down this Windows 8. They say future app developers should focus there, but you can only ship that with Microsoft’s permission and Microsoft’s approval through Microsoft’s store. And that sucks compared to the open nature of the PC platform before…”

In comparison, Valve’s Steam Machines are regarded by Sweeney as the “most open high-end gaming platform ever.”

However, Sweeney does believe that Microsoft will be more open thanks to recent changes in management, especially with regards to the recently revealed DirectX 12. “I sense kind of a renaissance at MS in the last six months. Talking to the DirectX team for example, they’re making some brilliant decisions on DirectX 12 to make it more efficient and more open than ever before. You just generally sense a momentum to be more open with the community and more broad with their Windows strategy. I’m hoping that takes root.”

What are your thoughts on Microsoft’s PC gaming strategy? Let us know below.

Epic Games is busy these days and more open to sharing information about their upcoming title Fortnite. Though announced way back in 2011, Epic has only now begun to tell just what kind of experience we could be in for.

As CEO and founder Tim Sweeney states to Polygon, “We’re building Fortnite, which is a bigger and way cooler game than we imagined. It started out as an internal game jam project at Epic and has grown over time. We have a combination of a great building game, an action-combat game and with some [light] elements of an MMO. We’ll be saying more about that in the coming months.”

The studio has 90 staff members working on the game and development will continue after release based on fan feedback. “We’re looking at the future of gaming from kind of a Valve or Riot point of view, making your games really accessible, being fair to customers and giving them a great value with a game that can be played for hundreds or thousands of hours.

“That’s what we’re doing with Fortnite and what we’re looking at for everything we do at Epic, from the games side to the engine side.”

For those worried about whether Epic will adhere to the same gritty, visually riveting games that catapulted it into the spotlight or not, Sweeney says that, “We’re also in the early development stages of a game that will continue the Epic tradition of pushing high-end, leading-edge graphics.

“We’re working very close with Nvidia on new features and capabilities to bring things to the next level. We won’t be announcing that [game] for a long time but we’re continuing to be at the forefront [of graphics technology].”

No information has been offered on what the game could be but slides showcased during an Epic Games panel at GDC indicate that it could revolve around the previously revealed “Samaritan” demo for Unreal Engine 4.

Speaking to Edge, Sweeney stated that, “We’re more enthusiastic now than ever about the future of high-end platforms. What we’re doing on high-end PCs is going to be representative of the future consumer gaming experience and it’s going to be awesome. It’s going to be a substantial leap over the current generation.”

Sweeney also played up Unreal Engine 4’s ease of development, stating that indie developers will also have a relatively easy time constructing a game using its tool set.

“[UE4] improves art production, content creation, iteration between programmers and artists… One artist working for six months can build a game with Unreal Engine 4 without actually programming anything and ship it, something on the scale of Angry Birds.

“And when you get to digital distribution and new methods of monetisation that don’t require paying huge amounts of money upfront, you have this huge potential to reinvent the game industry.”

The “substantial leap” of the next generation is still to be witnessed, since Microsoft is counting down to E3 and Sony is waiting to show us the future on February 20th.

Source: NowGamer

There have been a plenty of studios that have been closed this gen, and it has to do with rising development costs and the lack of sales for mid tier games. Epic Games released a new trailer called Samaritan which plenty of you guys must have dissected already.

The thing is, that trailer cost them a lot of time and money to do, almost  four months and a team of 30 people. This is a lot and Epic president Tim Sweeney expects next-gen costs to double if studios go for enhanced visual fidelity instead of creating something less ambitious.

“If we extrapolate that into creating an entire game, we were worried that the cost would go up by a factor of three or four or even five in the next generation.And of course, we felt that was not acceptable,” he said. (Via Gamesindustry International.

He instead praised free-to-play games, and it kinda feels like he is pushing an agenda here but this is what he said, “Free to play gaming is becoming more and more inevitable. If a user has world-class, AAA free-to-play games to choose from side-by-side with $60 games that are available only on a disc in a retail store, free-to-play games are very likely to win.

“So we need to really be mindful of this trend and start building games that have monetization and are designed to be piracy-proof.”

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney has revealed that free-to-play products are going to invade the world in the next five years, and the Asian market would prove to be really vital.

“All these western developers spending $30 million to develop these games for dedicated consoles – all of these companies are going to be invading the Asian markets within the next five years or so, and they’ll be free to play, worldwide, global products,” he said.

“The only way to survive is to go global. This is going to be the way that almost all games will be distributed worldwide.”

He has a point here, and considering ambitious free-to-play games like Dust 514 and the likes, are coming soon. It is going to be a revolution. Tribes Ascend was extremely profitable as well, so Sweeney does have a point.

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.