Id Software has pushed video game graphics technology above and beyond since the 1990s with DOOM: The Dark Ages just the latest project to do so. While not as groundbreaking as full-3D FPS gameplay in Quake, The Dark Ages’ mandatory use of ray-tracing was a big step forward for gaming.
Alongside the game’s mandatory ray-traced lighting setup—which MachineGames also did for Indiana Jones and The Great Circle—The Dark Ages also offered full path tracing post-launch for players with a beefy enough PC.
Speaking to Nvidia in a recent blog post, director of engine technology at Id Software Billy Khan explained discussed the introduction of path tracing into the Id Tech 8 engine. Khan admitted the technology is “more computationally expensive than ray tracing” but delivers “more realistic, physically accurate lighting and surface shading” and doesn’t take developers long to use.
“From start to finish, it took about six months to implement and ship path tracing in DOOM: The Dark Ages,” Khan told Nvidia.
When asked if future games from Id Software will also include path-tracing, Khan responded “absolutely”, however, the studio isn’t promising that every game they release will feature the render-intensive technology.
“Path tracing is now part of id Tech 8. We’ll continue research and development in this area,” they explained. “As with all technology, we evaluate its use on a per-game basis to ensure it meets the needs of the game and delivers value to players. I believe path tracing will continue to evolve and will be used in more games in the coming years.”
Id Tech 8 is a very powerful engine and has been used by a number of studios already for not only its powerful graphics tech on high-end machines, but also for its extreme scalability down to lower-end platforms.
Nevertheless, ray-tracing is now a major element of AAA gaming and the next major hurdle for rendering. Earlier this year, DOOM: The Dark Ages developers revealed that they saved years of development by using ray-traced lighting instead of pre-baked lighting as devs could make minor changes without spending hours “baking” their lightmaps.
While some gamers are still unhappy about the forced ray-tracing of some games—despite the fact that ray-tracing GPUs have existed on the market for 6 years and even handhelds have ray-tracing support now—it is the next step forward for gaming, and more games will be using it as time goes on.
