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Since the inception of 3D graphics, achieving photorealism has long captured the imagination–through the work of iteration on graphics processing architectures, it first made its way to offline renders aimed at mass theatrical consumption, but none of it was really achievable in any feasible capacity for gaming. The calculus is simple–to render physically-accurate scenes, path-tracing needed to be on the table, but because it was impossible to fit into a tight rendering budget (typically 33ms at 30FPS on the lowest end) through the pure use of programmable shaders, no developer could ever justify the proposition.
That would soon change as NVIDIA released its first-ever consumer-grade GPU with dedicated hardware ray-tracing capabilities back in 2018–the support was sparse at first, but as developers familiarized themselves with the technology, the standard has been set for what will soon be the future of gaming. Long gone are the days when artists would have to manually bake instances of global illumination to simulate the appearance of indirect lighting, or resort to static scenery to curb the steep budget of dynamic shadows and real-time ambient occlusion–if…
