In the field of PC gaming, real-time ray tracing will not truly enter the mainstream until 2018. That year, Nvidia released the RTX 20 series graphics card with Turing architecture, which set off a light chasing craze in the gaming industry.Recently, developer XL2 realized the ray tracing effect on a Sega Saturn console born in 1994.
This product uses a 32-bit architecture and is equipped with two Hitachi SH-2 RISC processors and two graphics processors.
Due to insufficient third-party game lineup, Sega Saturn's final lifetime sales were 9.26 million units.
Currently, this developer has built a small demo. The implementation method of light tracing is very simple, just testing all vertices through BSP (Binary Space Partition).
At the same time, the engine will only test the vertices of 3D objects, and only update a quarter of the vertices each frame, and the number of light sources is also strictly limited.
In the end, this developer successfully implemented light tracing on Saturn, and there are many feasible optimization paths in the future.
Some of them are "very easy to implement," while others require "a little more math."
