Unity & Imagination Technologies' PowerVR

News & General Discussion
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Unity announced that Unity 5’s editor will allow the use of Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR video cards (hardware-accelerated raytracing) to provide a quick preview of lighting; but will we be able to program these video cards in our applications as well? I would think so, but I haven’t seen any statement about that. Unity needs to allow something like this, or be left behind as hardware-based realtime raytracing gradually becomes the new paradigm in the coming years.

Here’s a video of an earlier version of the PowerVR video card doing realtime raytracing:

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Very nice!

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And also very nice to have, once these new video cards become common. They seem to work with normal textured polys (as implied by the term “hybrid” system, and by the examples in the above video), but I’m not sure how it works at a programming level. Does anyone know whether Unity will support this ?