Valve’s Source 2 engine could be about to add ray-tracing support, according to patch notes for one of its games.

As shared by SteamDB founder Pavel Djundik, the latest beta update for Valve’s Artifact includes references to both ray-tracing shaders and Nvidia’s RTX rendering.

Real-time ray tracing is a headline feature of high-end PC graphics cards and next-gen consoles, allowing for realistic reflections similar to that seen in CGI movies.

Source 2 powers Artifact, Dota 2, Dota Underlords and the recently-released VR title Half-Life: Alyx. Since Artifect is a fairly simple card game, it could be considered a viable testbed for demanding ray-tracing tech.

The update could, in theory, open the door for Valve to implement ray-tracing into the Half-Life series and the hugely popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.

However, this would require a transfer from the older Source engine and a rework of how lighting works in many of the older games, since the Half-Life games mostly feature static lighting that’s baked into the environments.

Fans already released an unofficial ray-tracing mod for Half-Life 2, as demonstrated in the above Digital Foundry analysis from May 2019.



Posted: Jan 17, 2021 7:44 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/half-lifes-engine-could-be-about-to-add-ray-tracing/