RayTracing in
Unreal Engine 4

About

The goal of this project is to test, explore, and showcase the recently added Ray Tracing capabilities of Unreal Engine 4. Once finished, it will contain a summary of available Ray Tracing effects, showcasing them in various types of scenes.

Part of this project is a downloadable demo application (scroll down for more info), which includes gameplay and testing scenes. The gameplay part presents selected Ray Tracing effects in an fps-puzzle type game, and the benchmarking scene allows the reader to freely experiment with most of the Ray Tracing settings themselves.

 

The project is part of a bachelor’s thesis at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague, Open Informatics programme, Computer Games and Graphics specialization.

Project Author

Vojtech Vavera (vavervoj@fel.cvut.cz)

Project Supervisor

Jiri Bittner (bittner@fel.cvut.cz)

How can you help?

Part of the project focuses on establishing Ray Tracing presets/quality settings, that balance performance and visual quality. The gameplay demo features Low, Medium, and High settings, and the benchmarking scene (also part of the downloadable demo) adds a Custom preset and the option to turn all the Ray Tracing effects Off.

To make the presets more balanced and useful, we need your help in evaluating the feel, performance and visual quality of the gameplay. Below you can find a download link for the demo, which, once you finish the short gameplay, redirects you to a short survey asking about the feel and performance of the demo, using the available presets. 

Download

To try the demo yourself, all you need to do is click the download link below and unzip the contents of the archive. Please note that for the Ray Tracing effects to work, you need a DirectX feature level 12_1 compatible system with latest DirectX 12 installed.

If you intend to help this project by filling out the survey linked at the end of the gameplay demo, please try all the available quality presets (Low, Medium, High – as described in the Tutorial below), as they are the main focus of the survey questions.

Download Demo

or clone the project: 

GitLab

If you feel stuck at any point during the playthrough, this guide should help you navigate the demo.

  • After launching the demo, choose the Play button to try the gameplay. ( The Benchmark button leads to a testing environment where you can experiment with various Ray Tracing settings Unreal Engine has to offer )
  • Controls
    • WASD – movement
    • Mouse – camera
    • Space – jump
    • E – interact
    • ESC – main menu
  • During the gameplay, you will encounter 3 puzzles:
    • The first puzzle, a mirror maze, requires, you to navigate a maze made of mirrors
    • The second area is a puzzle, where you need to position pushable blocks to form a passage to the next room
    • The third area is a maze, which contains a green wall with a red button – this is the finish, upon interacting with the button (E), you will be redirected to a Google Forms survey, asking about your experience during the demo gameplay
  • Quality Settings – during gameplay, you can change between 3 Ray Tracing quality presets by pressing the following keys:
    •  I (Low)
    • O (Medium)
    • P (High)