Epic Games shows real-time ray tracing in Unreal Engine with Star Wars demo

At first, when I looked at the Star Wars scene featuring two First Order stormtroopers and Captain Phasma, I thought it was a film. But it was a completely digital animation, made possible by a collaboration of Epic Games, Nvidia, and Disney’s ILMxLAB special effects studio.

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and chief technology officer Kim Libreri showed the demo to a crowd at the Game Developers Conference today in San Francisco. It was the first public demonstration of real-time ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4, which powers many of the highest-quality video games. And the result could be that video game engines like Unreal could be used to make films in the future.