Raylogic

Early Access Begins

12-12-25: After 5 years of development, Rayve is now in early access! Rayve is a lightweight engine for fun and creative game writing that uses ray tracing exclusively. Rayve still has a ways to go and is short on features, but is far enough along to create games. Work is now underway on a game to serve as an example for writing a game with Rayve. The initial game project will be made available soon, along with updates as it progresses. This should show what the engine can do and be a big assist for learning Rayve. Stay tuned!

Goodbye Rasterization

Rayve by Raylogic is a fully ray traced 3D game engine. Rayve completely replaces rasterization with compute-based rendering. OpenGL, DirectX and Vulkan* are not used.

Rayve uses a proprietary approach to ray tracing that balances graphic fidelity with fast frame rates. Deterministic ray paths are used that do not require denoising and give clean graphic detail.

*A part of Vulkan is used to access the GPU and display, but the Vulkan renderer is not used.

Ray Tracing Simplicity

No draw calls
No frustum culling
No occlusion culling
No overdraw reduction
No vertex/pixel processing
No screen space manipulations
No environment or cube mapping
No forward / deferred rendering
No level of detail meshes
No transparency ordering
No shadow mapping
No depth buffers
No mip-mapping
No filtering

Features So Far...

PBR materials
Dynamic lights
Dynamic shadows
Global illumination
Animated materials
GPU characters
GPU particles
Game physics
Scene queries
Collision events
Game serialization
Spatial audio
Simple fog
Skyboxes

Data-oriented entity/component design
Power-of-2 bucketed memory technology
True ray traced supersampling (1x to 4x)
Half-Res mode and trace limiting

More features to come...

System Requirements

* Microsoft Visual Studio 2026 required for early access.

* Rayve, and games made with Rayve, require Windows 10 and above.

* For FHD & QHD, Nvidia 3070 min (4070 or higher recommended).

* For UHD, Nvidia 4080 or higher recommended.

* A gaming class PC with a minimum 4 cores, 8gb main memory.

* Latest Nvidia graphics driver.

* Support for AMD GPU's is planned, but not currently available.

* The engine can technically be expanded to support cross platform games, but is not planned currently.

Modern

Since the beginning mainstream game engines have always used rasterization for rendering. Rasterization began life using assembly code on the CPU to cull and transform triangles in 3D space, then project (flatten) triangles to 2D in order to make use of the fast VGA hardware blitters (rasterization) for rendering. Lighting and shadows had to be done after 2D projection (difficult).

With ray tracing, the entire render path is in 3D space. There is no triangle processing, 2D projection or scanlining. Rays are bounced directly off scene objects (where they sit) onto the display. PBR materials, lighting, shadows and reflections happen as a natural part of the ray tracing process.

Because lighting and shadows are challenging with rasterization, many current game engines use a hybrid approach where ray tracing is integrated into the rasterization pipeline using shaders. If an engine handles all lighting with ray tracing shaders, it's called 'full ray tracing'. But the rasterization stage is still present.

Rayve just abandons rasterization entirely. All graphics are rendered through a Raylogic developed ray tracing core. Even user interface images and text are ray traced. For Rayve, this is 'full ray tracing'.

Simple

* Single C++ header file and DLL. The API strives for simplist use of C++.
* No level editor. 3D modeling software can create complete scenes to import into Rayve using Rayve's naming conventions.
* Easily deployable game project structure.
* Visual Studio class templates.