Why ray tracing?

• Vastly simpler pipeline by removing all rasterization vestiges.


• Lighting, shadows, reflections and refraction all come naturally.


• Frame rate is not affected as much by triangle counts.


• [World space -> view space -> clip space -> screen space] transforms are gone.


• Internal tests have rendered open world scenes with 7 million triangles at 300-600 fps

Simplicity

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

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.

The primary motivation in creating the Rayve engine was not for ray traced graphics (though they are nice!), but to see how simple/small a rendering pipeline can be, to counter current game engines' enormous size and complexity. Ray tracing was the key.

Ravye uses a single ~350 line compute shader for all 3D rendering, and outputs directly to the display buffer. That's the whole process.

Even though ray tracing is used for rendering, the priority is high FPS over graphics fidelity, as the engine is intended for games and not photorealistic rendering.

* A bit of Vulkan is used to access the GPU, but no part of the Vulkan rendering pipeline is used.

Features

Current features include fully ray traced rendering, PBR materials, skyboxes, dynamic lights, shadows, global illumination (light probes), particles, character animation, fog, physics, audio and 'make your own' UI widgets.

Up next is billboards, animated textures, post processing.

Further out is terrain related features (landscapes, vegetation, water), compressed texture support.