SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 5 — Though Xbox and PlayStation are yet to detail their proposals for a next generation of console hardware, Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XV studio, Luminous Productions, has been hard at work on a new graphical demo called Back Stage.
Luminous Productions, the Square Enix studio that developed 2016’s Final Fantasy XV, has released a two-minute video showing what a new batch of graphical techniques can do.
Back Stage, created in conjunction with hardware chip manufacturer Nvidia, is rendered in real time using a graphics card from the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti line.
While the card is, admittedly, a US$1,000 (RM4,198.8) piece of a top-tier computer set-up, Luminous’s use of a commercially available component indicates where gaming technology could go over the next five years.
The video is intended to show the sort of realistic detail attainable through ray tracing and associated path tracing techniques, according to an explanatory post from Nvidia.
“Visual realism improves greatly by using ray tracing,” the company wrote. Path tracing means that “shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, and diffuse global illumination lighting are all computed in a unified way, by tracing and bouncing millions of rays through a scene, instead of using separate algorithms.”
The implication is that the sort of graphical realism reserved for pre-rendered cinematic sections could be applied much more widely in a video game experience.
Executives from both Sony’s PlayStation division and Microsoft’s Xbox have spoken about how their next console iterations will accommodate new levels of advanced ray tracing technology.
Square Enix previously collaborated with Microsoft as well as Nvidia to produce Witch Chapter 0 [cry] a year before releasing Final Fantasy XV.
In addition to developing successors to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, Sony and Microsoft are also building streaming architecture to support cloud gaming; while their next consoles are not expected until 2020 at the earliest, Google’s own Stadia service is to start rolling out in November 2019. — AFP-Relaxnews
