Unity Engine Will Offer Real-Time Ray Tracing Thanks To Collaboration With Nvidia

At their GDC 2019 panel, Unity Technologies announced that they’ll be collaborating with Nvidia to allow developers using the Unity engine to enable RTX-based real-time ray tracing technology. While doing so, they showed off a short demonstration video as well, which in turn was made in collaboration with the BMW Group.

The trailer shows a 2019 BMW 8 Series Coupe rendered using the Unity toolset with RTX enabled, before finishing with a comparison between the car’s real model and a rendered one. It’s looking pretty impressive- take a look below.

Unity’s vice president of graphics spoke about the benefits of global rendering effects with the real-time technology enabled, saying it moves graphics “significantly closer to realism”. “We built HDRP with the future in mind and today we’re excited to announce that we are working with NVIDIA to adopt its RTX real-time ray tracing capabilities so we could bring this technology to all,” he said. “Real-time ray tracing moves real-time graphics significantly closer to realism, opening the gates to global rendering effects never before possible in the real-time domain.”

RTX in the Unity engine, the company revealed, is currently in production-focused early access, with an experimental build being rolled out soon. Meanwhile, a full preview in their High Definition Render Pipeline will be rolled out later this year.