Will the game include Hybrid Ray Traced Shadows, a temporary PC exclusive?

The next game GTA 6 What everyone is eagerly waiting for continues to be talked about. Indeed, it seems that the game will consolidate Exclusive technology on PC which is not able to use the current console. So we will have to wait for the next generation of home consoles to see the technology Hybrid ray traced shadows (HRTS in short) reach. In the meantime, it will actually be a PC exclusive, though Grand Theft Auto VI Console will come to PC later.

GTA 6: The game continues to be talked about

first appearance of GTA 6 It went official with its trailer, and it was so anticipated that it broke various records and continues to gather reviews on the internet months after its release. It is also the second most viewed trailer on YouTube. As expected, with the passing of this time, some engineers have analyzed in depth what Rockstar has shown and the first findings are interesting, because from the point of view of global light and surface reflections, GTA 6

will be Hybrid ray traced shadows (HRTS), but only on PC.

The trailer for GTA 6 It was a mix of what we can expect from the game on console and PC. It seems like no A famous singer The mixed visuals of both platforms, at least according to some engineers’ technical analysis, was due to the different ray tracing techniques used in the game.

But what exactly?Hybrid ray traced shadows And how does it work? This technique is quite complex and requires quite powerful hardware to achieve proper performance. In order not to complicate things or get into different technologies, just know that it is part of the so-called ray tracing hybrid (although technically everything is RTH, because there is no unified pipeline, it will come in the future. ), which is complicated.

What we need to understand about RTH is that it combines traditional ray tracing with shadow mapping.

In other words, you have the best of ray tracing with its reflections, global lighting, etc., but you add soft and sharp shadows that give a more realistic overall look, because interpolation is allowed between them.

Getting hybrid ray traced shadows requires another boost in this hybrid pipeline, called A conservative raster, which is based on primitives. To simplify the idea again, it is a branch of primitive-based rasterization that tries to represent depth based on primitive maps, hence the term “hybrid”.

To explain all this, we also need to add a third technique to the equation, called Soft shadows near percentages (PCSS), which many of us have encountered in the past for shadows in graphics settings. To achieve the end result with HRTS, PCSS is usually required, which further improves shadows, but at the same time uses a lot of GPU resources in the hybrid pipeline (may well prove useful for running the next generations of graphics cards. GTA 6 in 4K Ultra).

Once we understand this, more or less, the engineers’ analysis of the trailer images reveals that Rockstar will use HRTS technology on PC, but probably not on consoles:

“One of the obvious features of the trailer is that it can use appropriate RTX Global Illumination (RTXGI) depending on the scene.”

In other words, Rockstar can use RTXGI in real time, or store global lighting data to load when needed on static objects.

There are scenes where HRTS is clearly used GTA 6, while this is not the case in others. If true, it would mean that Rockstar could use RTXGI on consoles without HRTS statically, while both would be options to enable on PC.

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