Okay so that headline might as well be written in Sanskrit for some of you, but hey, for the tech nerds out there this week saw some pretty big announcements in terms of graphics. With Microsoft revealing its new DiretX Raytracing API at GDC, and then NVIDIA announcing its Volta-specific RTX Technology. Explanation after the jump. Honest.

So yeah, whats raytracing? well the realistic behaviour of objects in 3D space mostly in relation to lighting and the generation of shadows and reflections. What that means are in-game shadows that aren't approximations or reflections that are mere tricks - hence how their implementation currently shifts radically from game to game.

Raytracing is a process implemented by high-end visual effects houses and are what make CG pre-rendered videos look as good as they do. Here's a good explanation from NVIDIA that goes into the difference between raytracing and other methods. NVIDIA has been working on bringing this technology into the real-time space for quite sometime now and in collaboration with Microsoft will finally see it appear in the future.

Here are a couple of demos, one from Remedy and the other from Epic Games.





With the only catch being that this tech will be limited to NVIDIA's Volta architecture - which currently only appears in the expensive $2,999 USD NVIDIA Titan V. So yeah, chalk this one up as future tech that's technically possible today. But not quite for the masses.

That being said the technology is being supported by Microsoft, Unreal, Unity, Frostbite, and developers like Remedy, EA, and 4A Games.

So bring on the affordable Volta GPU.

Note: AMD has also confirmed that it will support Microsoft's DirectX Raytracing API