Square Enix Teases What a Next-Gen, Ray-Traced Final Fantasy Game Might Look Like

[Tsing]

Square Enix's FFXV development team released a tech demo ("Back Stage") earlier this week showcasing how great ray tracing can look on its internally developed Luminous Engine, which powered the latest Final Fantasy game. The sequence's lifelike lighting, shadows, and reflections were rendered "almost exclusively" with path tracing.

According to NVIDIA, "Back Stage" was rendered in real-time with a single GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Luminous Productions's studio head Takeshi Aramaki said his team made the demo to demonstrate how ray tracing could be used in a next-generation title, so the next Final Fantasy game should be an especially gorgeous one.

By making this technology a cornerstone of their AAA engine, Luminous Productions is signaling that the future of gaming is one with lifelike lighting powered by ray tracing. And by watching the Back Stage demo, you can imagine the incredible sights we’ll see in their future AAA games, and other high-fidelity projects that Luminous Productions is currently creating with Luminous Engine.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I'll interested to hear more in depth details as what they did here. FF engines have long been known to be demanding on hardware. Same goes for almost any implementation of ray tracing. Really curious how they combined both for such a nice looking demo.

 

[AntiQuark]

Was thinking the same.

 

[Brian_B]

I'll say this:

S/E has a long history of putting out amazing tech demos, largely based on Final Fantasy gaming engines. But when the games finally come out based on those engines, they look nothing like the tech demo.

For this demo - amazing (par for S/E tech demos), but wow the uncanny valley effect.