Unity Engine's main competitor, Epic's Unreal Engine, received official ray tracing support earlier this week in the 4.22 preview build for both low-level and high-level operations. During yesterday's post-earnings (Q4 2019) conference call, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang boasted this as very big news for the future adoption of ray tracing technology in games.
In his statement, though, he might have slipped something else that's not official yet - an imminent announcement that the Unity Engine will support ray tracing, too.
[...] And then probably one of the biggest stories that came out just last week is that Unreal Engine and Unity, both of the game engines are going to incorporate RTX and ray tracing technology in the engine itself. And so all future games in the future will be able to take advantage of that, so that's really big news and I'm excited about that.
Obviously, there was no such announcement as of yet, but Huang might have been confused about the specific timing of the announcement planned by Unity. There's basically no chance he just misspoke, either, given that he reiterated the very same while replying to another question later in the conference call.
[...] And we've already spoken about ray tracing earlier and we know that every single game that are coming out, we're working with the developers to incorporate RTX technology and a very, very big deal, both Epic with Unreal Engine and Unity Engine are going to incorporate ray tracing. It is very, very clear that the next generation of computer graphics is ray tracing. And all of the work that we've done with RTX to move the industry forward is well worth it. But remember, that's just the graphics part of Turing.
Of course, in and of itself it's not earth-shattering news that Unity would also want to support ray tracing technology. Still, Huang seems to be under the impression that this will happen sooner than later, so it's worth staying on the lookout for any official confirmation.
Another noteworthy takeaway from this second quote is that NVIDIA appears to be aggressively pursuing partnerships with as many developers as possible to add ray tracing in upcoming games. After all, the main complaint from GeForce RTX owners is that not enough titles support RTX and/or DLSS technologies, and both should be enabled in order to properly exploit the hardware of the expensive new line of graphics cards. Fixing the lack of software could go a long way toward improving sales, too.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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