You can trust VideoGamer. Our team of gaming experts spend hours testing and reviewing the latest games, to ensure you're reading the most comprehensive guide possible. Rest assured, all imagery and advice is unique and original. Check out how we test and review games here The era of ray-tracing is here. After years of tiptoeing around the modern lighting feature, some games are now requiring ray-tracing hardware to run such as Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, Star Wars Outlaws and the new DOOM: The Dark Ages. In an interview with Digital Foundry, Id Software’s director of engine technology Billy Khan explained that ray-tracing isn’t just a fancy lighting solution, but it’s a tool that helps to speed up the process of making games. Without the need to pre-bake lighting solutions, game’s can not only take up less space on a PC or console, but developers can iterate faster than every before. DOOM would’ve taken longer without ray-tracing Speaking to the tech analyst team, Khan explained that making DOOM: The Dark Ages “without ray-tracing” while keeping the same larger environments and complex cinematics “would have had to elongate the time [of development] by a magnitude of years”. For decades now, developers have been forced to pre-bake lighting with lightmaps and shadowmaps that take ages to calculate. As soon as something is changed in an environment such as a light fixture moving place or a piece of the environment changing location, those pre-baked calculations need to be ran all over again. Unlike ray-tracing, these pre-baked maps also take up storage space. “Without ray tracing and with the same design goals, we would have had to elongate the time by a magnitude of years.”DOOM: THE DARK AGES DIRECTOR OF ENGINE TECHNOLOGY BILLY KHAN “The more you can quickly iterate on it, the more polished and diverse the gameplay encounters can become,” Khan told the outlet. “Ray tracing allows us to do WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), replacing the approximate representation used by artists and designers with exactly what it’s going to look like on PC or console, without bakes that take hours upon hours. You can imagine what kind of speed improvement that is. It’s a 10x if not 100x improvement in iteration time. A lighter can now move a light in the middle of a meeting if we want a spot to be darker, for example.” Khan explained that making DOOM: The Dark Ages with ray-tracing requirements wasn’t just a technique to make the game look “really great”, but to overall make “a better game”. With the power of real-time ray-tracing instead of generated pre-bakes, there’s a lot more time allotted to experimentation that the team otherwise couldn’t afford. “Without ray tracing and with the same design goals, we would have had to elongate the time by a magnitude of years, because we wouldn’t have the ability to create the same type of content,” he explained. “If you have a baked lighting solution, some of those things can feel out of place, especially when you’re in a mech smashing into buildings and tearing chunks off. You can’t bake for these dynamic objects, so the ambient lighting would look off without RT; with RT, all of that stuff looks homogeneous and more real.” Khan also explained that it’s lucky that “all the platforms have ray-tracing”. While a Nintendo Switch 2 port hasn’t been announced, even that system supports ray-tracing in some form, although we’ve only seen one instance of it running on the hardware and that doesn’t look great. With this in mind, there wasn’t a need to spend an extreme amount of time working to support older hardware, even if gamers with older GPUs now need to upgrade to play. (Remember, we all upgraded for DOOM 3.) So-called “forced ray-tracing” is only going to become more common as the industry continues to evolve. With games now taking much longer to make, ray-traced lighting and reflections are a key component in shortening that development time. While we could have waited another three years fro DOOM: The Dark Ages, Id Software might not have been able to. DOOM: The Dark Ages Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X Genre(s): Action, First-Person Shooter Subscribe to our newsletters! By subscribing, you agree to our Privacy Policy and may receive occasional deal communications; you can unsubscribe anytime. Share