DICE made Nvidia’s ray traced gaming dreams a reality in just eight months

Real-time ray tracing has been the holy grail of the PC graphics industry for as long as I’ve been alive. And, despite my youthful good looks, I’m actually an increasingly decrepit old man. The seminal 1979 Turner Whitted paper, "Multi-bounce Recursive Ray Tracing" kicked it all off and, after many years of brain-aching research, false starts, and architectural developments Nvidia has created an immensely powerful slice of silicon which is finally capable of dealing with the demands of real-time ray tracing, the Turing GPU. But Nvidia needs some more big brains to get that sexy new RTX 20-series hardware working to actually realise that holy grail in a shipping PC game… and that’s where DICE comes in. DICE is not going to be the first out of the door with an RTX-powered game that’s utilising the ray tracing power of the Turing GPUs, but with Battlefield 5 it’s probably going to be the most immediately impressive. We’ve played through the new Rotterdam map, using a $1,200 Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti and, while it is limited to 1080p in the early alpha stage, it’s still an incredibly impressive first stab at real-time ray tracing in a game that’s actually going to ship this year.