Raytracing

Exor in collaboration with AMD implemented the RDNA 2 architecture features.

Ray-Traced Shadows
Ray-traced shadows allow us to introduce additional shadow casting lights into the game world. For example, we can add an intense light source to a burning boss creature that walks around the scene and casts deep shadows from all of the details that are present in the world's geometry, even singular blades of grass are going to cast perfectly detailed shadows, updating every frame. Another example of how we use real-time ray tracing is special events like a comet flying over the player's head. The comet is an intense light source moving quickly across the sky and creating a fantastic spectacle of shadows on the ground.



Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion
Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion is a very advanced rendering technique. It simulates the behavior of light in places that are not directly lit. It is an approximation of global illumination that was previously available only in offline rendering scenarios. It provides excellent visual results in areas that are covered by dense vegetation or complex rock formations, by creating shade where it would form in real-world conditions. Doing it in real-time was previously not achievable due to the immense amount of computing necessary to calculate the behavior of light. Now thanks to the Radeon RX 6000 series we can enable this technique in The Riftbreaker to achieve very detailed shadowing.



FidelityFX Variable Shading
Variable-rate shading is one of the latest Direct X 12 Ultimate rendering techniques that allows the GPU to select an area of the screen to be rendered at a lower sampling rate. AMD Fidelity FX Variable Shading allows us to very efficiently select areas of the scene that are low on detail and can be rendered with a lower sampling rate without any visible degradation to the image quality. Some of these low detail areas can include for example places covered in deep shadow, plain ground textures, or areas of the screen covered by transparent user interface elements. Thanks to this new rendering technique we can save a lot of GPU power and deliver much higher frame rates to the player, without noticeable loss in graphical fidelity.



Source: Steam News