Unreal Engine Adds Support for DX12 Raytracing

Ever since Nvidia launched its RTX GPUs, the company has been banging the drum on ray tracing as a major, must-have feature that will eventually transform the entire gaming industry. Unfortunately, the company’s efforts to promote ray tracing as a truly imminent Next Big Thing as opposed to a technology that’s perpetually 4-5 years from introduction has run into a problem: There aren’t very many games that can take advantage of the capability.

There’s an inevitable lag period between the introduction of any new hardware capability and the appearance of software that can take meaningful advantage of said hardware, but in this case, there’s an added wrinkle. If you’re a game developer that wants to integrate ray tracing into your upcoming game, you need an engine capable of handling ray tracing in the first place. Epic has been talking about ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4 for years — the company demoed a real-time ray tracing workload in Star Wars last spring:

And then followed it up with a SIGGRAPH demo called “The Speed of Light,” which you can also see below:

Fast forward to today, and ray tracing support has been formally integrated into the upcoming version of Unreal Engine 4, 4.22 (support is offered in Early Access, which Epic notes is intended to be used with caution). The patch notes state:

Added ray tracing low level support.

Baking in better support into game engines is a critical component in rolling feature capability out overall. UE4 has been integrating ray tracing for quite some time — this functionality isn’t dropping in out of the blue — but it’s a necessity to any push to see ray tracing in more titles.

Continue reading

Nvidia, Google to Support Cloud Gaming on iPhone Via Web Apps

Both Nvidia and Google have announced iOS support for their respective cloud gaming platforms via progressive web applications. Apple can't block that.

Asus Announces Chromebox 4 With Support for 10th Gen Core Processors

Chromebooks are so plentiful these days they might as well grow on trees. There are fewer Chromeboxes, but Asus has been keeping its line updated and just announced its latest version.

AMD Will Bring Smart Access Memory Support to Intel, Nvidia Hardware

AMD is reportedly working with Nvidia and Intel to bring hardware support for Smart Access Memory to other GPU and CPU platforms.

Intel Is Spreading FUD About Supposedly Huge Ryzen 4000 Performance Drops on Battery

Intel believes it has presented evidence that negates the value of AMD's Ryzen 4000 product stack. Intel is mistaken.