Month: November 2019

With a new generation of consoles on the horizon, curiosity definitely strikes when thinking about what they’re going to bring to the table in terms of graphical power. Will they deliver a transformative jump for next-gen? Will they do native 4K with better textures and higher frame rates? Or is there a feature cooking in the background that we don’t know about yet? We can count on one graphical capability that’ll be new to the console world when PlayStation 5 and Xbox Scarlett ship late next year: ray tracing.

What Is Ray Tracing?

Ray tracing is an advanced method of illuminating 3D environments. With ray tracing, light sources cast out linear rays of light which then bounce off the surface it hits to another and to another until it reaches your eye, or the camera view in that 3D environment. Another factor ray tracing accounts for is the fact that different surfaces (like glass or water) will reflect, refract, and absorb light differently. These calculations lead to a more accurate representation of how light works in the real world.

Areas obstructed by objects and blocked from light rays are properly darkened as a result (meaning proper shadows) and a scene’s illumination looks more realistic. Ambient light can also affect the darkness of shadows and ray tracing accounts for this, too–not every shadow is pitch black due to varied environmental illumination. Light will behave and react accordingly with mirrors, glass, and liquid as well. Scenes are able to represent changes to lighting conditions since rays are being cast and calculated in real time, making for realistic and dynamic environments.

It’s much more clear when you see it for yourself, and Nvidia has an in-depth walkthrough of ray tracing in action:

Since light sources can cast thousands of rays and can bounce off multiple objects and surfaces with varying properties, it becomes a burdensome rendering technique for graphics processors. These are all calculations that your hardware has to process in real time and considering just how complex and intense ray tracing is, it’s unreasonably difficult for current consoles to do it.

What It Takes To Do Ray Tracing

Ray tracing is currently making waves in the PC hardware space and first hit the consumer market last year with the launch of Nvidia’s RTX family of video cards. These graphics cards are built with Nvidia’s Turing GPU architecture which include dedicated processing cores–called RT Cores–to solely focus on ray tracing and work alongside the main GPU cores. Currently there are 8 video cards in the Nvidia RTX lineup equipped to handle ray tracing in PC games:

• Titan RTX
• RTX 2080 Ti
• RTX 2080 Super
• RTX 2080
• RTX 2070 Super
• RTX 2070
• RTX 2060 Super
• RTX 2060

Ray tracing is also on a spectrum; Nvidia allows games with RTX ray tracing features to control how many rays can be cast in order to perform ray tracing. This means previous generation graphics cards can at least toy around with the tech, but it’s largely inadvisable since you can take drastic hits to your framerate.

The interesting aspect to next-generation consoles aiming for ray tracing is the fact that hardware manufacturer AMD will be building the graphics processors for both Xbox Scarlett and PS5. Currently, AMD does not have a GPU on the market specifically built for ray tracing and has only said that it has plans to dedicate the shader cores on its video cards to do ray tracing in the near future. Of course, future console hardware will be much different than what’s currently available for PCs, so we’ll have to wait until we get more details on how next-gen platforms will handle it.

But Why, Though?

You might be wondering, how is that any different from how light and shadows work in games without ray tracing? By comparison, the more common method, called rasterization, is a quicker way of doing lighting and shadows though it is more crude. But it doesn’t account for the constant bouncing of light rays since it doesn’t include real-time calculations. Nvidia has a more detailed explanation rasterization.

When it comes to how ray tracing actually affects a scene of a game, I often think about Nvidia’s presentation of how ray tracing looks with Metro Exodus’ global illumination. Without ray tracing, the inside of cabins are fairly lit, albeit flat and not entirely accurate in terms of how it would be in the real world. With ray tracing enabled, light that shines through the windows bounce around and illuminate the areas of the cabin properly, leaving certain corners darker in the players view:

Animated films, such as Pixar movies, have been using ray tracing for years. But of course, these are not interactive experiences that need to be rendered in real time, and film studios also have access to powerful machines that can render these scenes efficiently. But gaming hardware is slowly getting there. Sharper shadows, better ambient occlusion, and proper global illumination are all the benefits that animation and games get out of ray tracing.

Many high-profile games have included Nvidia’s RTX ray tracing tech and there will be more to come. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is the latest release to use the tech and next year’s highly-anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 will take advantage of it, too. Developers typically work alongside Nvidia to implement it properly, and so far, here are a few of the big games:

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare
• Control
• Battlefield V
• Metro Exodus
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Cyberpunk 2077 (upcoming)
• Atomic Heart (upcoming)
• Quake II
• Minecraft

The term ray tracing is increasingly getting thrown around in discussions about the next generation of gaming hardware, and if you haven’t been keeping up with the PC hardware then you may be lost; hopefully we’ve at least provided a fundamental understanding of it. To put it simply, ray tracing is a graphical rendering technique that has light sources casting rays that behaving as they would in the real world to provide more realistic looking shadows, reflections, and overall illumination–however, it’s hardware-intensive.

We don’t know much about how next-gen consoles will be handling ray tracing, but don’t expect every PS5 and Scarlett game to include it or run the full gamut of ray tracing features. The tech is still in its early days and only a handful of PC games have it implemented today. If you want to get into the weeds of ray tracing, you can check out this Nvidia developer blog that explains the heavy technical details.

Rick and Morty Season 4 Episode 1 spoilers ahead!

The Rick and Morty Season 4 premiere has finally arrived, and with it, the opportunity to spend an inordinate amount of precious time digging deep into every possible aspect of this beautiful 23-minute animated wonderland that we can think of.

In “Edge of Tomorty: Rick, Die, Rickpeat,” Morty gets his hands on a “death crystal” that shows him how he’ll die, and uses it to manipulate his future so he winds up with his classmate Jessica–a familiar obsession for the teenage boy. Rick, meanwhile, gets continuously re-routed to other Ricks’ clone vats and deals with an increasingly strange series of alternate realities. It all comes together for an action-packed (and pretty disgusting) climactic battle that involves a giant hologram of Rick given physical form, and a lot of wasp eggs.

The episode managed to look back at Rick and Morty’s past, referencing the classics, while still maintaining forward momentum. Read our review here, and keep scrolling to discover all the Easter eggs and references we could spot in the episode. Let us know below if we missed any.

1. Welcome to Margaritaville

The Margaritaville necklace from Jessica’s funeral selfie stays with Jessica into old age, if Morty’s visions of his death are legit. Why anybody’s grandmother would leave them a Margaritaville necklace when she dies is a bigger question for another day.

2. Things Have Changed

Beth admonishes Rick for dragging Morty on another adventure without asking whether he actually wants to go, saying, “Dad, there’s a way we do this now.” The events of the show’s Season 3 finale apparently had a lasting effect on the Smiths.

3. You’ve Gotta Put These Seeds Inside Your Butt

This episode marks a return to something resembling the classic Rick and Morty formula. Appropriately, the expedition to collect “death crystals” bears a resemblance to the show’s very first episode, when the duo embarked on an equally dangerous quest to acquire some very painful-looking seeds.

4. The Many Deaths of Morty

Keep an eye on Morty’s death crystal visions throughout the episode to catch many glimpses of various ways in which Morty might die, including but not limited to: being sucked into a toilet, getting his head stuck in an elevator door, being blown up while defusing a huge bomb, spilling a vat of toxic waste only to have a passing car splash it onto him, being crushed in traffic by a log that falls off a truck, simply falling off a ladder, and countless more.

5. Operation Phoenix Down

Rick remarks that he canceled “Operation Phoenix” and took his own clone vats offline a few seasons ago. This is a reference to the episode “Big Trouble in Little Sanchez,” when Rick cloned himself into a teenage body. At the end of the episode, he realized that Operation Phoenix “[was] not the fallback he thought it would be” and destroyed all his clones.

6. Time Travel Stuff

There’s a box in Rick and Morty’s garage labeled “time travel stuff.” As Rick hops between different realities in this episode, the label on the box changes, from “fascist time travel stuff” to “shrimp time travel stuff” and finally “wasp time travel stuff.” Rick tends to be pretty literal sometimes. (Side note: Series creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon have said more than once that they won’t do time travel on the show, making this something of a meta joke.)

7. Fascist Fans

The entire sequence with fascist Rick and Morty can be viewed as a meta commentary about the subset of the show’s fans who believe Rick and Morty shouldn’t weigh in on “political” issues and just want to watch Rick and Morty go on adventures. “Stop asking questions!” fascist Morty tells Rick. “Stop doing meta commentary! Just have fun!”

8. I’m Mr. Meeseeks

The fascist Morty scene is also full of reference to past classics, including Mr. Meeseeks, of course, not to mention Revolio Clockberg Jr. from the Season 1 episode “Ricksy Business.”

9. Playing God

Every time Rick gets re-routed to a new reality, you can glimpse a pair of less-fully-grown clones gestating in the background. These fetuses change as the realities change, becoming tiny shrimp, teddy bears, and more.

10. ABC, 123

On the blackboard in Morty’s classroom are equations such as “1 ass + 1 ass = 2 assess [sic]” and “babies come from space,” not to mention multiple drawings of penises. Also, in the top right corner, you can see that Morty has detention.

11. Coco

The bully who promises to murder Morty makes a reference to Coco, the 2017 Pixar film in which a young Mexican boy visits the Land of the Dead.

12. Fait Accompli

The bully also references “fait accompli,” which is a French term that means something that has already happened by the time those who are affected by it learn about it.

13. Randall from Recess

One of the bully sidekicks is clearly Randall from the show Recess, which ran on ABC Kids between 1997 and 2001. This Randall-alike has appeared previously on Rick and Morty–a roided-up Rick and Summer beat him up at the end of Season 1, Episode 9, “Something Ricked This Way Comes.”

14. “An Akira-Type Situation”

The police officer who arrives while Morty is decimating his bullies describes the confrontation as “an Akira-type situation.” He’s referring to the 1988 anime film that’s widely considered to be a classic. From this point forward in the episode, there are many more references to it–even the song that plays sounds similar to Kaneda’s Theme from the film.

15. Judges Shouldn’t Believe in Ghosts

The news ticker visible in the episode has several surprises. For one, it points out that “no matter how you pronounce ‘La Croix,’ you sound stupid;” hard to argue with that. The ticker also reveals that the judge who Morty just mind-melted has killed herself, to which the Center for Suicide Prevention replies that, while it’s a tragedy, “judges shouldn’t believe in ghosts.”

16. Trover Saves the Universe

There’s a billboard in Times Square for Trover Saves the Universe, Justin Roiland’s VR game from earlier this year.

17. “Where’s my Boglin??”

This show’s greatest mystery is now why the first thing Rick searches for when he realizes Morty has pilfered his arsenal of sci-fi weaponry is the 1980s Mattel puppet toy known as the Boglin.

18. Kirkland Brand Meeseeks

The Kirkland brand of products comes from the bulk store Costco. It’s essentially the store brand–the joke being that store brand products are inferior to name brands.

19. “AI Racist Accusatory Isaac Asimov Bulls***”

This quote of course references golden age science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who wrote frequently about robots and artificial intelligence.

20. Ferro Fluid

Hologram Rick calls the black and red goo that takes over his body “Ferro fluid,” which is basically a high-tech liquid that reacts strangely with magnets and is used for a wide variety of purposes.

21. 100 Years

Rick and Morty’s back-and-forth at the end of the episode is a reference to a similar exchange from the show’s pilot, which seems meant to demarcate the show’s intention to return to classic formulas while continuing to push boundaries (as the titular characters put it, more or less).

22. The “Stinger”

This episode features an after-credits stinger scene in which Morty overhears Jessica talking to her friends and realizes his vision of their future relationship wasn’t what he thought it was.

23. “Edge of Tomorty: Rick, Die, Rickpeat”

Lastly, the episode’s title is, of course, a reference to the 2014 Tom Cruise movie Edge of Tomorrow, which was also known by its tagline, “Live, Die, Repeat.” The movie is about a soldier who relives the same day over and over–it’s basically sci-fi Groundhog Day.

The second season of Titans, the DC Universe original series, is still underway on the streaming service. Given that the upcoming second season of Doom Patrol will be available on both DC Universe and the upcoming HBO Max streaming service, some were wondering just how long the former would last. Now, Titans has been renewed for a third season, which will air on DC Universe in the fall of 2020, ensuring the service will be staying put.

Warner Bros. announced the news without giving any details about what Titans Season 3 would entail. However, if the second season is any indication, get ready for even more new additions to the cast of characters plucked from throughout DC mythology. Thus far, Season 2 has seen the arrival of Superboy (Joshua Orpin), Deathstroke (Esai Morales), Dr. Light (Michael Mosley), and Blackfire (Damaris Lewis), just to name a few.

Another season of Titans on DC Universe is an exciting prospect, but it’s not the only original programming coming to the service. The second season of Doom Patrol will continue to air on DCU, alongside HBO Max. Meanwhile, the animated Harley Quinn series will premiere on November 29. The animated series Young Justice: Outsiders has also been renewed for another season.

There are also a couple of projects for the service that remain a bit of a mystery. A Stargirl series was previously announced for DC Universe, though a release date has yet to be announced. It was also revealed at New York Comic Con that BizarroTV, an anthology series, was being developed.

Pokemon Sword and Shield finally arrive on Nintendo Switch this week, and The Pokemon Company is offering a few freebies for early adopters. Not only can you claim a Meowth capable of Gigantamaxing if you pick up a copy of either title by January 15, those in the US can also receive a free outfit for their trainers.

From November 16-25, you’ll be able to claim a free download code for a track suit trainer outfit at a participating Walmart location. To get the code, you’ll first need to download and install the Pokemon Pass app on your smartphone. Once you have the app, you’ll need to head to a Walmart and use the app to scan a QR code that’s on display at the store.

After you’ve gotten a download code, you’ll need to follow the steps below to input that into your game and download the outfit:

• Launch your copy of Pokemon Sword or Shield
• Select Mystery Gift from the menu
• Select Get a Mystery Gift
• Select Get with Code/Password and follow the prompts to connect online
• Input your download code
• Visit the fitting room in a boutique to access the outfit

If you’re eager to pick up Sword and Shield this weekend, you’ll want to head to Walmart anyway, as the retailer is offering the games for $49.94 each on launch day. This promotion is in-store only, so if you want to take advantage of the deal, you can kill two birds with one stone and get the free download code as well. For more early deals and pre-order bonuses, be sure to check out our Pokemon Sword and Shield pre-order guide.

As previously mentioned, you can get a free Pokemon in Sword and Shield as well. If you purchase a game by January 15, you’ll be able to receive a free Gigantamax-capable Meowth via Mystery Gift. If you have save data of either Let’s Go Pikachu or Eevee on your Switch, you’ll also receive a Gigantamax-capable Pikachu or Eevee within the games.

If it wasn’t obvious, PlayStation fans have no shortage of cool games and gadgets available for their favorite console this year. Here are our picks for the best video games and accessories to gift the the PS4 fanatics in your life this holiday season.