Ray tracing is becoming more and more exclusive to Nvidia with games like Star Wars Outlaws and Star Wars and the Great Circle.

Two upcoming games will be heavily relying on ray tracing to produce the best graphics possible at this year's Gamescom. Star Wars Outlaws and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle have graphics features that were either developed exclusively by Nvidia, or are so demanding only high-end GeForce cards can handle them.

Nvidia introduced its GeForce 20-series graphics card, the first GPU to offer real-time ray-tracing hardware for gaming at a Gamescom in 2018. Since then, AMD, Intel, and all the new gaming consoles and PCs are more or lesser capable of ray-tracing. Nvidia's GPUs are faster than their competitors, but three games prove that Nvidia is pushing the technology to its limits.

Take the recently released Black Myth: Wukong. The graphics of the game are stunning, but if you want to get the best visuals possible, you will need to enable Full Ray Tracing. The game runs with Unreal Engine 5 by default, and uses Lumen ray traced global illumination. Full ray tracing is a path-tracing algorithm.

You may already be familiar with path tracing if you are a hardware enthusiast. If not, you might have seen it in Cyberpunk or, more recently, Doom 2 mods. Path tracing is a bunch of different algorithms, but the idea is to allow developers to push the amount of Ray Tracing that's taking place without utterly destroying the performance. It's still a very demanding process, but the results are impressive.

At Gamescom 2024 it was announced that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle will also feature path tracing, sorry, Full Ray Tracing. There's no indication that this option will only be available on GeForce RTX graphics cards. However, given the high demands of the game, you can be sure that only the RTX 4080 Super and RTX 4090 are capable of running at a decent framerate.

Black Myth: Wukong works well on mid-range RTX cards with Full Ray Tracing enabled, as long you keep the resolution low and use lots upscaling and frames generation. Theoretically, AMD and Intel GPUs could run it as well but my testing showed that it was not worth it.

Star Wars Outlaws is also due to be released on August 30. It doesn't feature Full Path Tracing, which I'll call FRT for now. But it does feature a Nvidia technology called RTX Direct Illumination (or RTXDI).

While I am not allowed to provide any specifics about the GPU technology that runs this algorithm best in terms of speed and bugs, I will give you a guess.

I spend a lot of time in my free-time messing around with DXR code and using Lumen within Unreal Engine 5. It's obvious that I have a biased opinion when it comes to the use of Ray Tracing in games. If more and more games feature FRT to achieve the best graphics or use more of Nvidia APIs for Ray Tracing, then I am concerned that the entire thing is becoming a one-horse race.

Ray tracing may not be a race but, let's face it, the technology will be used more and more in games. This is especially true for high-budget games. Consoles will only become more capable.

The latter is the most effective counter to Nvidia's dominance of the ray tracing market, as consoles are powered exclusively by AMD chips. Developers who make games exclusively for this platform only have to consider how RDNA RT units can handle everything.

In the world of PC gaming right now, it's RTX hardware and software all the way. This is great news for Nvidia shareholders, but not so good if you own an Arc or Radeon graphic card.

It's likely that AMD's desktop graphics cards will feature RNDA 4's improved ray tracing unit, but it's unlikely that any high-end models will use these chips.

Intel's next generation Battlemage GPUs could be fine, but the software support may not be as good.

Nvidia has created some amazing hardware and software for PC gaming. I hope that game designers will use Black Myth Wukong to inspire what modern graphics look like rather than as the best way of implementing ray tracing.