Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora to employ Ray-Tracing. Software Ray-Tracing on older PC cards.

[Ghostsonplanets]

Avatar: Erster Blockbuster, der Raytracing zur Pflicht macht - auch ohne RT-Grafikkarte

Ubisoft setzt bei Avatar voll auf Raytracing: Für die Beleuchtung wird es keine andere Render-Methode geben. Eine Raytracing-GPU braucht ihr dennoch nicht.

www.gamestar.de

" Avatar will be a title that will only appear with ray tracing. But we're developing the game so that the quality and performance will be scalable.

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Stefanov couldn't give us the exact performance data, but he at least states that the ray tracing calculations using the compute shader run " surprisingly quickly ".

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Ray tracing is by no means the only aspect in which Avatar relies fully on "Next Gen". How important a fast SSD is for the game

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[Ghostsonplanets]

IGN Article with developers where they talk a little about it:

Why Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Had to Be a Next-Gen Only Game - IGN

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be Ubisoft's first new-gen-only game – we spoke to its developers to find out why it demands next-gen hardware to run.

www.ign.com

"but also when you're flying high up in the air – to have a lovely vista and far-distance rendering, where we can even use the ray tracing to do shadows super far away, you know, three or four kilometers away from you."

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So a couple of examples, we have a completely new lighting system that is based on ray tracing, and I think it is a dramatic step up in quality that makes you feel like it's a real place. One tiny example is that it can actually handle the translucency of the leaves [...] so it can figure out how much of the light is reflected through the leaves, how tinted it is with the colors and everything else. You get lovely reflections and sights for the water, even down to the volumetric clouds up in the sky – they actually receive the correct lighting as well."

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