Hardware accelerated ray tracing is a fascinating technology able to deliver amazing visuals, as mentioned by the newly appointed Xbox head honcho Phil Spencer a while ago, and during a livestreamed talk at build Development Director Ales Holecek was asked if the company has plans for it, and he responded that the company is looking into the tech, but it won’t be part of DirectX 12.
"Not as a part of DX12, we definitely talk about all kinds of interesting things, which we could be driving into the hardware, obviously ray tracing is one of them, there was just a recent announcement about hardware accellerated ray tracing, but there are other possibilities and other opportunities which we’re looking at about what we can do, we have projects which will benefit from some of these technologies greatly."
For those that aren’t familiar with ray tracing, it’s a tech that generates the pictures by tracing the trajectory of light through pixels on the screen, and simulating the effects of its collision with the objects depicted by the scene.
While, as Holecek says, it won’t be part of DirectX 12, it’ll be quite interesting to see what “projects” he’s talking about, and what kind of benefits they’ll entail. As usual, we’ll have top wait and see.