Ray tracing will be required by AAA games in 2023

Thanks to Nvidia’s RTX series of graphics cards, PC gaming has entered the era of hybrid ray tracing. From here on, gamers across all platforms will start to hear more about hybrid ray tracing. Both Sony and Microsoft have confirmed that both of their next-generation consoles will support some form of hardware-accelerated ray tracing. 

Nvidia’s Morgan McGuire has predicted that the first AAA games to require raytracing will release in 2023. This suggests that all major gaming platforms will support ray tracing by this date. Furthermore, by around 2035, full-on Path Traced gaming is expected to become a reality in AAA titles. 

Today, gaming is entering into an era of raytracing coexistence; where some graphical techniques can now be enhanced or replaced by accurate raytraced versions. Shaded fallback options will be available, enabling ray tracing to be turned off when played on hardware that lacks support for it. In 2023, ray tracing is due to become a more dominant aspect of game engines, so much so that ray tracing acceleration hardware will be required. This means that gamers will require graphics hardware with bespoke raytracing support, bringing us into the hybrid era for both raytracing and rasterisation. This era is due to last for a decade.