Gaming giants Nvidia and Epic Games have released an official Unreal Engine 4 ray tracing demo that's free to download and play now. Nvidia is a multinational technology company responsible for developing gaming hardware, best known for its powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) opposite rival company AMD. Epic Games, meanwhile, is a video game developer and publisher that's created such popular games as Fortnite, and it's also the owner of the Epic Games Store and the Unreal Engine.

Unreal Engine 4 was created by Epic Games and officially released for use by game developers in 2014. The engine has been used to make a variety of games, AAA, indie, and everything in between, and has been praised for its quality visuals and ease-of-use. One talented Redditor recently used Unreal Engine 4 to recreate locations from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, breathing a stunning amount of new life into these classic locations using realistic lighting effects. UE4 was also used in an extremely impressive recreation of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Similar to the starting locations from Diamond & Pearl, these Zelda locations were given new life using UE4 and its impressive lighting and texture effects.

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As reported by DSOGaming, Epic Games and Nvidia have released a free and playable Unreal Engine 4 RTX tech demo (thanks, DSOGaming) that shows off the engine's capacity for ray traced lighting and shadows. Ray tracing (which Nvidia brands as RTX) is a rendering technique that allows for the creation of realistic light, reflections, and refractions in real-time. The UE4 RTX demo, which takes place in an attic, allows players to toggle ray tracing effects on and off in order to fully appreciate what an impact the technique has on in-game visuals. The difference is truly remarkable, and the demo as a whole serves as an excellent demonstration of how UE4 and Nvidia hardware can punch up less excited spaces with the help of ray tracing and sufficiently powerful hardware.

Ray tracing is a new and very useful technology that has brought video game graphics closer than ever before to photorealism. In order to show off ray tracing's power, many developers choose to specifically highlight its use as a marketing tool. A recent video preview of Resident Evil Village was used to show how the game will utilize ray tracing on capable Nvidia GPUs, with the game's spooky lighting being given an extra level of atmosphere by deeper shadows and real-time lighting.

Developers already see ray tracing as an important leap in video game graphics, as the technique allows for the creation of almost photorealistic locations and characters. Epic Games and Nvidia's free playable demo will allow a much wider audience to truly determine the value of ray tracing for themselves, so wider access to tools like this without asking laypersons to make their own games is a really cool step in the right direction.

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Source: Nvidia (via DSOGaming)