“Reflect” Tech Demo is Portal With Bells, Whistles, Real-Time Path Tracing

One of the best parts of being committed to PC gaming is seeing impressive new tech get rolled out. Reflect is a part game, part tech demo created by the IGAD program at the NHTV University of Applied Sciences in Breda, Netherlands. It may look a bit Portal-y, but the difference is that it uses the Brigade, a real-time path tracing engine that represents the future of gaming graphics. Essentially, path-tracing is a stochastic process that… you know, I’ll just let the developers explain this one. I always assumed the thing that was going to replace rasterization was going to be space magic.

Path tracing is a process that constructs a large number of paths between the camera and light sources (typically via scene surfaces) to estimate the color of each pixel. This is a stochastic process, which causes the noise in the images. Although more samples would reduce the noise, path tracing is rather compute-intensive.

The noise they are talking about is pretty obvious within the video, but it doesn’t entirely obscure what an advancement this is going to be in rendering technology. By moving to stochastic processes as opposed to the more common deterministic ones used in rendering, it gives a more realistic example of shadows and lightning.

If you want to download Reflect or read more about how this works as explained by the people who actually created it as opposed to being explained by the guy who once almost started a fire trying to install a motherboard, check it out here.