Rayve is a C++, Windows only, Visual Studio only, closed source game engine with a small license fee. Yep, pretty much bucking every current trend.

Anyway, Rayve may be the only general purpose game engine available without a rasterization pipeline.

Rasterization was invented long ago to flatten 3D scenes to 2D so that VGA hardware blitters could render a scene faster. OpenGL, DirectX and Vulkan are the direct evolution of rasterization.

Consider all the things rasterization deals with: draw calls, frustum culling, occlusion culling, overdraw reduction, vertex / pixel processing, screen space projection, environment / cube mapping, forward / deferred rendering, transparency ordering, shadow mapping, depth buffers, filtering and more.

None of this is necessary, because rendering games should really be about lighting, not converting stuff to 2D. So what does Rayve use? This page's crazy background is the clue - Rays!

But wait - current engines have ray tracing! Yes, but its integrated into their rasterization pipelines. Rasterization remains and scenes are still flattened.

Instead, Rayve replaces rasterization with a fully compute-based rendering pipeline built around deterministic ray tracing. Scenes are rendered entirely in 3D straight to the display's framebuffer.

Deterministic ray tracing is Raylogic's own version of ray tracing. Some shortcuts are taken to make ray tracing really fast and noise free. The visual trade-offs are not typically noticable for games.

Rayve has a great entity/component framework and API that makes writing games with Rayve really fun. Rayve uses the smallest subset of C++ possible to keep things uncomplicated.

Rayve is code-centric and does not have a level editor. But importing entire levels with collision from a 3D modeling tool is really easy.

Rayve is an alternative game engine that may never have the features to compete with Unity or Unreal. But maybe you still want to try it? No judgement from us. Rayve is available for $35. Not free, but free adjacent.