Why ray tracing?

Surpisingly, the primary reason is not for ray traced game graphics, but to reduce the complexity of the rendering pipeline. Over 30+ years, rasterization technology has become mind-numbingly complex. In contrast, ray tracing is refreshingly straightforward. With ray tracing, all rendering calculations are in 3D space. With rasterization, many calculations are performed in 2D space, signifcantly raising complexity. But ray tracing can be slow. Rayve engine is exploring new RTX based techniques to overcome this barrier.

Simplicity

• No vertex processing
• No frustum culling
• No occlusion culling
• No overdraw reduction
• No draw calls
• No shadow mapping
• No environment or cube mapping
• No forward / deferred rendering
• No transparency ordering
• No level of detail meshes
• No depth buffers

Performance

Rayve has rendered a 7 million triangle scene at 400 fps at 2k resolution and 150 fps at 4k resolution on an Nvidia 3080 TI. This is very dependent on the materials and lights in the scene. Ray tracing performance is more affected by screen resolution than by triangles in the scene. Rayve can process roughly 40 million rays per frame on the 3080 TI and stay above the 100 fps mark.

Different to the core

The Rayve game engine doesn't include ray tracing, it is ray tracing. Rayve was written from scratch with ray tracing at the core. Rendering in Rayve has no resemblance to the rasterization pipelines currently used in games. Ravye uses a single compute shader that implements a proprietary form of ray tracing to allow natural light properties to render a scene directly to the display's frame buffer. That's the whole process.

Features

Current features include ray traced rendering, PBR materials, skyboxes, dynamic lights, shadows, global illumination (light probes), physics, audio and 'make your own' UI widgets. Up next is particles, billboards, animated textures, skinned character animation. Further out is terrain related features (landscapes, vegatation, water), decals and compressed texture support.

A very useful importer console app is included that allows easily importing entire scenes from Blender3D (or other properly set up .fbx file). Videos explaining the import process in detail are planned.

*Please Read*

Rayve is a new approach for rendering games, and will need time to grow. It currently works on Windows only. Overall, working with Rayve is similar to other game engines, but there are some differences due to the requirements of the rendering engine. Also, please read carefully the requirements panel below.