Ray Tracing and Gaming - Quake 4: Ray Traced Project

In 2004 I started working on one of the first raytracing computer games as my student research project. As a base for this project the content from “Quake 3” was used. It was amazing how easy it was to program special effects that would have taken much longer using the conventional graphic technology called “rasterization” used by common graphic cards. For example dynamic, per-pixel real-time shadows are calculated with about ten lines of code as described in the introduction figure about ray tracing.