According to NVIDIA researcher Morgan McGuire, 2023 will be a turning point for ray tracing. He predicts that is the year when ray-tracing GPUs will be mandatory for at least one triple-A title.
I predict that the first AAA game to REQUIRE a ray tracing GPU to run will ship in 2023, and every gaming platform will offer accelerated ray tracing by that year. #SIGGRAPH https://t.co/orlS2Ka51Y pic.twitter.com/lETomAM9b7
— Morgan McGuire (@CasualEffects) July 28, 2019
McGuire also believes that path tracing will supplant ray tracing by 2035. But for the preceding decade, games are expected to rely on a hybrid ray-tracing/rasterizing system, which will improve lighting dramatically.
In 2024, McGuire believes that a truly hybrid ray tracing/rasterizing system will be implemented in video-games. This hybrid solution will offer area light shadows, ambient occlusion, glossy reflections, rays for data structures, ray traced audio, perfect particle collisions and perfect AI visibility.