Unirronically I agree with this. I still have yet to see a use case of ray tracing that makes it worth the 50% hit in fps.
A lot of the implications for ray tracing are on the dev-side of things. It's a bit hard to explain without going into technical details.
Essentially, getting light to look "right" is very very hard. To do it, devs employ a lot of different techniques. One of those older techniques is baking the light on static objects, essentially pre-rendering where light goes and how it bounces. This has been done for a long time, e.g. even in Half-Life, the lights are baked for static geometry. So in a way, we have been using ray-tracing in games for a long time. however, it isn't real time ray-tracing, as the information gets stored in light map textures, so there is no performance impact other than storing the texture in RAM/VRAM and drawing the texture together with others.
The inherit problem of that technique is that it only really works for static geometry. If you move your light or any objects in the scene, your lightmaps will no longer match. To solve this, there are mixed modes which use real-time lights, dynamic light maps, and other tricks. However, these are often subject to problems and/or the limitations of using real-time lights. Real-time light problems are: You can only do a limited number before getting a serious performance impact, especially if the lights produce shadows. Soft shadows, shadows in big areas, and very detailed shadows are extremely hard to do as well without some advanced tricks. Also, ambient occlusion and global illumination is not something you can just give lights (there is screen-space GI and AO, but they don't look good in all circumstances, and you have limited control. There are also some other techniques some engines did for real time GI.).
Also there is the problem of baked light affecting dynamic objects, such as characters. This has been solved by baking so called "light probes". These are invisible spheres that store the light data and the closest data then gets applied to the characters and other dynamic objects. This again has a some problem, as it's hard to apply multiple light probes to the same object, so lighting might be off. Also, light direction is not accurate, which causes normal maps to look very flat in this light, and local shadows do not work using light probes. The same is done for reflections using reflection probes which are static. These are 360° "screen shots" essentially storing the reflection at that point in space. This however costs DiskSpace/RAM/VRAM, and it will not hold any information for moving objects (that's why sometimes you can't see yourself in the mirror in games). Also, the reflections sometimes look "out of place" or distorted when the reflection probe is too far from the reflecting surface (again, these cost VRAM and RAM so you don't want to place them in front of every single reflective surface). It costs a lot of time to find the right balance. For the rest, usually screen space reflections are used, as any other real-time reflection is extremely costly as you essentially render the whole scene again for each local reflection. Screen space reflection is an advanced technique that works very well for stuff like reflective floors, but you will quickly see its downsides on very mirrored surfaces as it lacks information that is not on the screen. Some games like Hitman for example use the mix of those techniques extremely well.
Coming back to lighting, there are now better techniques used for example by unreal and some other engines (and now unity in experimental). The light gets stored in more predictable data structures, such as 3d textures. This way, you can store the direction of all light in each cell. The light then gets applied to the objects passing through those cells. This looks pretty good, and the runtime cost is fairly low, but the storage cost of such textures is a tradeoff of texture resolution and fidelity. These textures cost a lot of VRAM to store and without using advanced techniques and tricks, have their own limits (e.g. for scene size). It also costs a lot of time to create each time you change the scene, and it also doesn't eliminate all problems mentioned above, like reflections, moving lights, etc.
Specifically, there is the problem of character lighting itself. Using light probes on characters usually looks pretty bad, as it removes a lot of detail of advanced skin shaders. Even with the above mentioned techniques, character lighting is still extremely hard to do. There is also some other problems, like ambient shadow in already shadowed areas, and light balancing for character versus scene lighting.
For that reason, most AAA games use separate light rigs for characters. Essentially floating lights that ONLY affect the character and move with them. When the mixing with the scene lights is done right, the rig adapts to the current situation in terms of light direction, color, and intensity. If you look in most AAA games, you can often see situations where rim-light comes from a direction where there is no actual light source. However, this way, the devs and artists have full control over lighting the characters. Essentially like a real movie production would have, but without the limitation of the real world.
Now, ray-tracing as you know it right now is not quite there yet, but eventually, ray tracing is the solution to a lot of the problems mentioned above. Things like polygon density, light count, global illumination, ambient occlusion, light direction, reflections, and much more are simply "there" for you to use. Now this doesn't mean that it will automatically make everything look great, but with the overwhelming amount of different tricks that have to be used for current gen games to make the look good, it opens a whole new world of possibilities.
Also, something that will not directly influence the final game, it will eventually simplify things for devs so that more time can be invested into other things.
At this current usage of ray-tracing, it's more like a gimmick, because devs will still focus most resources on the current ways to use light. This is because most people don't have cards with sufficient ray-tracing capabilities. So for the moment, I agree that the performance hit is not worth it. However, eventually it might become the default way to draw games. While we are not quite there, in terms of performance, I think that things might become a lot more consistent and predictable eventually for raytracing.
YES, thank you! You saved me a lot of writing haha
This is spot on and the real advantage of ray tracing - when it becomes the norm it'll look better, provide effects that are extremely difficult or impossible and do so with minimal dev pain.
Worth mentioning that we're also about halfway on the average time for these big features to hit significant saturation, like with PhysX. It's pretty common for a GPU (and sometimes CPU/Chip set) to take 3-4 generations to trickle down enough through new products and used product sales to have decent enough depth/usage. At this point depending on how Apple is handling ray tracing, they might slow down the transition away from rasterized.
Awesome and great explanation for a layperson. Because the industry has been faking lighting for so long and lighting is quite important, the industry has become incredibly good at it. But it also takes a lot of development time that could be spent on adding more content or features. There's a reason the opinion about ray tracing is extremely positive within the game development industry. But also nobody's expecting it to become the norm over night, and the period with hybrid support for both raytracing and legacy lighting is only just starting.
Remember PhysX back when it was a separate
card Physics Processing Unit before they shoved it on the GPU before they even had multithreading? Yea it evolved. But the original implementation was not ideal.
Can't wait to play it on a graphics card I can afford in 20 years or so.
Me just quietly waiting for AMD to get competitive with ray tracing
Honestly all of the "it runs badly even on a 4090" stuff is talking about 4K with all the settings maxed - It runs at a solid minimum 30 for me at 1440p on my 3080 at nearly ultra settings. As long as you're not expecting 60FPS at 4K, you can enable RT overdrive on affordable hardware.
Raytracing is good but the problem is that were are in a transitional period (and Nvidia keeps upselling it's products)
I haven’t personally experienced a game that made use of it, so it must not exist
This u?
The problem with raytracing is that it's real strengths are in places where traditional rendering doesn't work at all. As soon as raytraced games stop needing a rasterized option, raytracing will really become useful. Most of it's advantages are around dynamic scenes where you can't just bake the lighting, or reflections which without raytracing will break if you look at them slightly wrong.
Edit: Most of the minecraft raytracing implementations are lacking in my opinion, but minecraft is a game that is well suited for raytracing. Really just anything with a dynamic world.
Yup, I have a 3090 and even then I don't bother with RTX. It's a gimmick Jensen and Nvidia love to push as a must have feature. In reality you don't notice it if you're playing a game normally, it's a "stop and smell the roses" feature you only turn on to check out once and turn off immediately when you get frame dips.
How can you implement anything meaningful with ray tracing when shocker, not everyone can use ray tracing. Games are unfortunately designed for the median crowd. I would argue maybe the next console generation shall be that point when ray tracing is the norm. We have seen this fairly recently with SSDs, where they floated around for nearly 10-14 years in the consumer market being a cool piece of tech but most games were being designed for a hard disk except now most consoles have SSDs as the base standard, so this means the game can be designed around that specification and take advantage of it. Even though I am a PC stan, I understand consoles have a huge impact on the gaming industry.
That is why they came up with DLSS and then the frame generation. But of course it's proprietary tech confined to the newest most expensive cards by Nvidia. Utterly useless
Are we going to ignore FSR and XESS probably wouldn't have existed without this push? Like even if you don't use Ray tracing I think its fair to say you can benefit from DLSS (even though one can argue its a cheap gimmick to raise your fps count) but having it as an option is a good thing.
Frame interpolation is still a weird one to me.
Like, with how the latency is obviously still tied to the base framerate, and the fact that lower framerates mean less information to calculate good interpolated frames from...
Basically, the tech is at its worst for low-end hardware that needs it the most. (Which is probably why they chose to restrict it to new models, now that I think about it)
A 4090 owner turning on DLSS3 is kinda like a dental surgeon getting a third car for their birthday.
Upscaling has come a long way though, and the anti-aliasing they use in DLSS is so good, they've released it as a standalone feature. That I can appreciate, anything is better than what some games do with TAA.
Spider-Man 2 has launched with ray tracing always on and looks and plays phenomenally. Super immersive to swing around the city and have proper reflections off all the skyscrapers!
Ray Traced particles are pretty cool in Returnal and Control.
Getting the vibe that OP is being serious while using a template supposed to be ironic.
Seems odd to be angry about game graphics progressing. Imagine how it was during the 90s.
You may not like it, but Lara Croft pyramid boobs is peak graphics
"Pyramid" boobs and "peak" graphics.
I like what you did there ;)
This comment is right (and left) on point.
And if they are serious it doesn't make sense, ray tracing, path tracing, global illumination, make a game leaps and bounds more enjoyable for me. Realistic lighting is everything, I cannot wait for the day they finally get the new global illumination system in star citizen...
games should look like they were made for the ps2 or else im not buying
PS1 or bust
Best console, best graphics:
As someone who grew up with a Commodore 64 I present Bruce Lee
(oddly I can't upload gifs so apologies for the link)
I grew up with one too, but I didn't have that game.
On the other hand, there was Jumpman...
For quite literally years I couldn't remember the name of that game so thank you! I use VICE these days as an emulator and one of my friends had that game but literally couldn't remember the name.
No problem. There was also Jumpman Jr., which was basically just the same game but with new levels.
I remember that too. So many memories...
Curious as to whether you were an Amiga person too? I've found Commodore wasn't very well known at all in the US but the UK, Australia and most of Europe it was super popular.
I had an Amiga 1000 and A590 hard drive after they were obsolete, but it was almost solely used for writing (probably terrible) music with OctaMed. A friend had an Amiga 500 and it was pretty cool. There was also, oddly, an Amiga dealer on the square in the Indiana town where we lived and we got to be friendly with them. I used to hang out in their store and play with the CD32. There was a pretty fun game called, I think, Psychopath, where you're being chased by a serial killer.
I also had a friend when I was younger whose mother pirated pretty much every C64 game for him. It was amazing how many games he had. He eventually got tired of me coming over because I only wanted to play with all of his C64 games.
Hahaha, I remember OctaMed. My older brothers had A500s then A1200s. I had a CD32 for a while too until realised it was a dead platform (although Liberation kicked arse).
I know that feeling lol, I had 'friends' who were only friends because they got games from Singapore and the UK and I'd just want to pirate them but we weren't actually friends.
Do you have a gpu that can run max raytracing at 1440p - 100+ fps?
I'm not saying it's a worthwile investment, but if you CAN run it well... you're going to.
What gpu can actually run 100fps with rt on 1440p?
Yes I did, still choosed to run games without raytracing on ultra without any upscale. Of course I did notice some (imho!) minor nice lighting and refraction stuff with raytracing, but for me these never justified the performance loss and the soft look of an upscaled image.
Therefore I'd rather choose not to play with raytracing and I don't have the feeling that I miss something :)
The biggest reason your not seeing much benefit is because a) the tech hasn't matured to a point where rasterization techniques can't produce the same effect and b) devs aren't developing games with raytracing in mind.
Honestly, the most impressive examples of raytracing have been Nvidias tech demos, more specifically Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft RTX textures.
It's gonna take time for raytracing to impress but when it does it's going to blow your mind.
I cannot wait for the day they finally get the new global illumination system in star citizen
I don't think so, it's clearly an ironically hyperbolic statement
I don't know man, some people unironically thinks the earth is flat, that if a supernova happened in our galaxy the earth would blow up or that Volkswagen is pronounced with an English v and not with f despite listening to a German explain the German v. You can never tell when it comes to internet strangers.
Most of the comments (at least when I opened the post) were talking about RT as if it all does is ruining performance and shouldn't be used.
This, but unironically. Games don't even need such realistic graphics, anyway - I'd much rather play a stylized or even 2d game where the devs focused on mechanics and fun, rather than pretty lights.
Minecraft, ULTRAKILL, Undertale, Celeste
all of them some of the best games in my opinion, how many use ray tracing? ZERO.
Hollow Knight, Crosscode, Hades, Dead Cells, Signalis, Dusk, Outer Wilds, Underrail, and more are all great examples of relatively modern games that kill it in the graphical department without using anything fancy.
Edit, because this is fun: Boltgun, Sea of Stars, the Bloodborne PS1 demake, Tunic, and more.
Minecraft shaders look great though, especially the rtx one for bedrock. If it was more open source, I'm sure ray tracing would be great to implement into shaders.
i was talking about unmodded java edition
Celeste still has really nice lighting in places, imo, but you are right, it all just comes from good colour choice and artistic skill, not some premade graphics option that they flipped on.
Don't worry bro just turn on fake frames and upscaling. Now we get shitty graphics AND raytracing at the same time!
The weird hybrid solutions that game devs are coming up with to beat out the old tech without doing full RTX is awesome. And for that reason I like RTX, because its pushing development of ideas that work better for today's hardware and today's applications.
Raytracing is genuinely cool as hell, but Nvidia needs to stop being a dumb cunt about it
Nvidia is succeeding (in business) by being cunts, In don't know if they will ever not be cunts. 😂
But you can still buy freesync and g sync monitors, however it seems freesync won that battle. It'll be a matter of time.
Don't even get me started on adaptive sync. New Gsync monitors are finally capable to run VRR with AMD gpus now. Why do they bother still making them, then?
After playing Portal RTX and Quake 2 RTX, my opinion is that what we really need are games that fully embrace RTX as their rendering. Lower poly count, use materials more, lean in onto the cool lighting.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077 use RTX, but it's just painted over so it is very expensive for what it brings to the table. Sure it's more accurate and having reflections is neat, but it costs more than some shadow maps and doesn't beat good artistic design.
Yea were still in that transition period. One of the other problems is having RTX requirements only. Eventually the GTX cards will have to die out in order for this to be achieved though.
Yeah, we will only start seeing games that fully rely on raytracing when low-mid tier GPUs will be able to support at least current day RTX 3070 performance. As in, you can do better but at least you can run stuff fully in raytracing.
RTX in Spider-Man/Miles Morales on PC was... Amazing.
Being able to see yourself swinging by windows in realtime, shadows from buildings...
It was worth the FPS hit.
You know, that's fair. Most of my experience with RTX in games so far been in first person shooters and they're kind of lacking in environments like those.
Mostly stuff like slightly better lighting in Cyberpunk or the flickery caustics in recent Robocop game. Bonus points for the games that implement RTX reflections and shadows but don't have your character reflect or cast a shadow.
This feels like one of those "VR in the 90s was shit so we should never develop VR" kind of things.
It's really moreso that raytracing nowadays is intensely poorly implemented when there is usually better ways to go about it.
We have the means to be efficient about our graphics. But instead we go about it in the most unoptimized ways imaginable
That's exactly my point. Raytracing is being shoehorned into things without them being optimised specifically for it at the moment. That doesn't mean we should stop developing the tech entirely because people are implementing it poorly most of the time.
How do you "optimize' it? You would think with so many game companies using it that if there was a better way than there would be at least one title with optimized ray tracing. The issue is the computational requirements for convincing ray tracing. When Toy Story 1 was rendered originally it took 45 minutes to 3 hours to render a single frame of video. Give it time and the GPUs will eventually be fast enough. Baby steps with new tech.
Optimization is not an on/off switch. All companies are optimising their implementation to the best of their ability/budget. As coders get more familiar with the tech and it becomes more commonplace, as well as work being done by graphics card companies on their drivers, it will reduce the computational requirements over time. There's a hell of a lot of work that goes into graphical processing on hardware, software, engine and game levels to make things look better for less computations, it's not just "tell GPU to do simulate every particle from the sun".
There's also the other side of the issue. As tech gets better, devs are less incentivised to optimise their crap. Which leads to games that look and function the same as older games, but are now bloated beyond belief.
It's a strange paradox of tech innovation. The more powerful our tech becomes, the less we feel like properly utilizing said tech.
Vr is the 3D cinema of gaming
When I got my oculus quest I played it as often as possible. That’s the problem though, it just doesn’t make sense to play it almost ever.
If I were a teenager or someone who lived alone I could really get into it. The problem is disconnecting entirely from everyone around me for a game.
With my Steam Deck or my Switch, I can put my kid on my lap and play. I can sit it down easily and help my wife with a chore. I can walk around at work in my downtime and play.
VR is awesome. I absolutely love it. I just don’t have time to fuck with it. I would imagine that’s the case for most people.
I have two kids and very little gaming time, but more than 75% of that time I spend in VR. With the increased immersion/escapism I have completely abandoned desktop gaming. Playing FPS on desktop just feels silly now
I guess it really depends on lifestyle and career and age of children and all that.
I get really stressed when I disengage from my family for too long and can’t see what’s going on around me.
I’ve played VR at work. It’s fine for single player games where I can pause and come back. Multiplayer games get really frustrating though when every 5 minutes you’re being pulled out and you can’t just jump back in.
I love VR. I just can’t seem to find the time to fully immerse and escape.
I agree with you on shooters. I am insanely good at Pavlov and when I jump into something else (non vr) it just feels so restrained. Moving around and actually feeling like you’re firing your weapon is a big deal. I’d like to get something to attach my controllers to at some point with some weight so it feels even better.
Yeah my play sessions are usually when everyone is in bed so cutting myself off from other humans isn't an issue! Looking at my backlog of games that require longer sessions and it's just not gonna happen with my current lifestyle.
A few years back when I had more time I messed around in Skyrim with a controller taped to a weighty staff. Managed to get it lined up perfectly in game and the trigger was usable. Using phones as motion sensors so I could walk without using a second controller. And voice control spells. That shit was crazy fun, and obviously incredibly dangerous heh. Can't wait till VR is mainstream and we get more cool controller hardware.
I am son disappointed that 3D TV is dead. For few movies or documentaries it was brilliant. Exploring a prehistoric cave for example. Hopefully we still can play 3D with VR
Same here, it's just a great evolution of gaming. 2D gaming is actually starting to feel obsolete the more I play VR.
I too have a family and a job and lots of things to do, and I still find time to do the cool stuff I want to do like VR. The "isolation" that the other person is talking about is not an issue for me because I can stay aware of people around me with my ears and stuff.
3D cinema is more like light gun games. Kinda cool but it doesn't really advance anything.
Man, now I've said that I miss the old Namco arcades.
Correct. This meme templates is a unreasonable Statement paired with outdated arguments and modern images/facts poking fun at idiots. It also commonly confounds the reason for the thing with something easily observable.
Isn’t VR still pretty shit?
It's expensive, but a high end rig with a good headset (index or vive), it's pretty great.
I'm surprised they didn't go with the fact that ray tracing shoots rays out of the camera rather than having light radiate from light sources.
"That's a scientifically outdated view of how light works! Light enters your eyes, not the other way around! What is this? Emission theory? Are we back in the 1600s? They've played us for absolute fools."
That's clever. Only trace the rays that the camera can see and probably cheaper to send some rays from the camera to the sun than vice versa.
Exactly ! this makes the problem potentially millions of times easier, since you know with certainty that every ray fired is going to contribute to the image, whereas firing rays from the light source would guarantee you never see most of them, the processing power is wasted and your image never converges
Counterpoint: I like pretty lights and don't mind having to play at a suboptimal framerate if it means more detail that I'm going to notice and enjoy.
Also, I keep seeing people confusing photorealism with a lack of style, when that's just not true. Pixar movies for example are photorealistic but stylized. You can have fancy lights and cool styles.
I disagree that pixar movies are photorealistic... They're pretty solidly on the cartoon side of things
Pixar movies have accurate lighting which makes them look great. Lighting separates a good looking game from a great looking game and is more important than textures imo.
Main point aside, that isn't photorealism tho. Photorealism is depicting something almost identical to a real life photograph or simply what most consider realistic graphics.
I would consider photorealism to mainly be light-based (prefix photo meaning light), but I get what you mean. I'd consider photorealism and realism to be separate. "I can see that existing" vs "I can see myself being there"
A better example probably would've been claymation, or pokemon concierge.
Edit: my definition of photorealism might be off.
Yeah I got your point but pretty sure photo in photorealism is just photograph. Not sure if there are any term like that for realistic lighting tho.
Raytracing produces realistic visual effects without requiring tricks like ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, shadow resolution and so on, since those emerge as a result of raytracing anyway and are much more realistic. I'm currently rendering a Donut in Blender where the effects are clearly visible in comparison.
However, due to the high amount of optimization in visually impressive realtime rendering engines like game engines, I agree with you that I don't see many benefits comparing ray tracing in games with contemporary alternative techniques.
Nevertheless I think that's the future. In the long run, there's nothing better, i.e. more accurate, than simulating the behavior of light when it comes to visual realism.
Also, baked lighting has another cost - nothing that is baked can be dynamic, and it has to be done during development, so it takes up dev resources.
Raytraced stuff happens immediately without tricks. All you need is the geometry and the materials to be accurate, and it should look right, no questions asked.
Once we get to a point where raytracing can be assumed even for low end systems, the problem where systems can't run certain games could become a thing of the past. I mean, if manufacturers weren't constantly bombarding us with planned & perceived obsolescence.
in the case where you have vehicles with explorable interiors (like the ships in Star Citizen), lighting has to be dynamic because lighting conditions change just as a result of flying around normally. The position of the sun in whichever of the two (current) star systems you're in relative to your ship, and the atmosphere which may or may not be present outside, the position of cargo and objects/materials that will be receiving light and causing it to diffuse onto surrounding surfaces in a cabin also requires at least some kind of reference or it just feels BAD.
But the recent citizencon engine presentation showed some AMAZING new short cuts that give just enough visual fidelity without tanking the framerate that it scratches some kind of itch DEEP within the predictive modeling of the human mind... when light acts more like it's supposed to, it's fucking magical.
Eh, pathtracing is pretty cool, and when used correctly, it can lead to real amazing results, while the artist does not have to care about performance as much. Baked lighting is very nice for static scenes, but it also consumes a lot of storage.
Godot's SDFGI seems like a good tradeoff, particularly as it works well on not-super-new GPUs (Juan: "but you can run them great on something old, like an gtx960 or a rx450 and get pretty real-time lighting at 1080").
It's not really that dynamic yet though, but I looked at their presentation where they talked about future features and they said that support for dynamic objects will be coming. I'm pretty excited about where its going.
Sdfgi is pretty cool, (I develope with Godot), but for now it's still really hard to figure out the right settings for it to not be a gigant splat fest... Cuz it leaves splats of color all around the place. Outside scenes work a lot better though, so that's cool.
cyberpunk has a path tracing setting and it gives me even worse performance than ray tracing 😭
that's because it's more intensive than Ray Tracing.
hello I would like to run my games at 1 quarter framerate please
True, it does tank performance a lot. For that though, you are getting actual realistic lighting, which makes certain scenes look like absolute garbage, since these scenes were designed with the "fake lighting" in mind.
To be fair, lighting is the most important part of generating photorealistic graphics. Having realistic and real-time lighting makes it look so much more realistic
photorealistic ... realistic ... real-time ... more realistic ...
We had a tool for that: it was called IMAGINATION
The graphical fidelity fetish has complete ruined gamers' ability to immerse themselves in make believe worlds without the game doing all the work for us
My tone is /s, but despite my hypocrisy I do believe this is half true
Its not like games that tried to be realistic before didn't exist and not like games that purposely go for a non realistic style now are not a thing. I'm pretty sure we have more pixel style graphics games coming out now yearly than when they were actually a thing.
We have more indie pixel games coming out yearly than all of the original consoles put together during their lifetime I'm pretty sure.
I wouldn't be surprised. You probably have young people making games that have nostalgia for games made in the style of 8bit, more than the games that were made that way because of tech constraints.
"Fake it till you make it". Using various techniques it is possible to simulate a fake ray tracing. It doesn't need to look as real as in real life, just similar enough so you wouldn't notice during gameplay.
AI frame gen and AI upscaling is what I am most excited about...
Counterargument: my 3090 is my space heater
This, I can't run my pc in the summer, makes the room far too hot
Ray Tracing is awesome
Yeah I met Ray back at a comiccon in '99. Really down to earth but very bright guy. No room for any disrespect, and his wife Judy is a gem too.
Just a side note: simulating light in a 3D environment is the stuff you could use to write a fucking phd, no joke. And another if you can figure a way to make the algorithm faster
And if you do either of those, most games companies would love to snap you up right out of graduation.
And then lay you off when shareholders don’t like the cost of paying for a PhD.
What a stupid comment.
Yeah, it is really dumb. Almost as bad as suggesting game companies are looking to onboard people during layoffs.
Counter, or maybe side, argument; the problem is that nobody has actually done it well. There is a very real difference to be made using real time pathtracing, but everyone is distracted by pretty lights.
counter counter or maybe side side argument, teardown had voxel destruction with ray tracing i think.
maybe not, the wikipedia article is a bit vague on it.
it says they were initially implemented with raytracing, but idk if that means the final game utilizes raytracing.
Ultimately, ray tracing was used for most graphics elements, allowing for more realistic lighting.
[Reviewers cited] its use of ray tracing
Source article: "Ray tracing is so crucial to Teardown that the world goes black if you turn it off"
I think it's pretty clear, tbh.
ah yeah there ya go, twas used for lighting, which we were trying to find an example of other stuff.
oh well.
Am I the only one who thinks that Ray Tracing doesn't even look good?
My brother and I upgraded our computers recently. I went with bang for buck and got a 6600XT, he wanted the RT experience and got a 4070TI. Playing cyberpunk on his computer was disappointing tbh. I expected more from almost a 400% more expensive setup.
Apparently 90% of people can't even tell so...
Just tells you how many tricks have been developed to make rasterization look as good as it does. Fascinating, really. It's always interesting to see how people work around a limitation.
The thing with real-time raytracing and pathtracing is that instead of being a workaround, it removes the limitation entirely, which is damn cool.
Just need faster hardware still, which will take at least another decade with how Nvidia keeps milking the smallest improvements gen after gen.
This tracks with every other graphic option if the person doesn't know exactly what they're looking for, in my experience. Most options don't have such a huge impact, and are more just "yeah, that feels a bit better, I guess" once you get past the basic, obvious stuff like resolution.
I like the way insomniac does it with their games on PS5 : priority on hitting 60fps and then raytracing.
Honestly I like ray tracing but I like 60fps more. I don’t care about resolution tho, 1080p is good enough for me. 1440p if I really want to push it.
4K was invented by TV makers to sell 8k TVs
1440 @ 120hz is the absolute sweetspot for gaming idc what anyone says. 4k is completely unnecessary
1440 looks nice up close, on smaller screens, but it’s definitely not got the pixel density to compare to 4k on larger panels. Both have their place and use cases.
I realize everyone has their own preferences but I opt to run my PS5 in 1080p more often than not, and that's on a 55" 4K panel. To me the smoother experience is completely worth the trade off in density. I hate running things in performance mode and getting 20-30fps. It looks choppy, feels sluggish, and is an inferior gaming experience for just about every type of game in my experience. On desktop I also prefer to force 1440 when playing on the TV. That display can only do 60hz but still feels better to me. The desktop card can put out a much better 4K experience, but I still feel like it's not worth the fps drop. I'll take stable 60fps vs a wobbly 40-50 all day.
What ps5 games are you playing that get 20-30 fps in performance mode? All the ones I own, which is almost every major ps5 title, has performance modes that either do 60fps dynamic resolution, 1440p60 wrapped in 4k, or 40fps at 4k120, or dynamic 4k60. Some get 45+ on average with unlocked framerate and dynamic refresh rate.
What desktop card do you have? Must be a pretty pricey one to outperform the ps5 at 4k. My 2070 is smoked by the ps5. I’m going to upgrade to the 5070 when it comes out.
Does the ps5 still not support native 1440p? Is that why you pick 1080p?
Most games don't give the option of resolution, it's just "performance" or "quality" in the game menus. So I set the system to 1080p in the settings primarily because the PS5 thinks my display won't support 1440, which holds water because I have to force it on my desktop. I don't have the option to force on my PS5 I don't think. Do I?
And yeah, I get awful jittering on just about every quality mode but I don't think I've tried it since setting it to 1080. I probably should! The ones I know for sure were horizon FW getting CRAZY slow on quality, that was def 4K because it was one of the first games I got. Ghost of tsushima was a little better but iffy in entire sections of the game. Returnal was probably the best, and the only one I can remember not forcing to run in performance mode. Lords of the Fallen is most recent and it is BAD in quality mode. It's rough even in performance mode in big sections, but makes sense because it's one of the first UE5 games available.
My GPU is a Gigabyte 3070 of some kind. For all the hate it got for having low RAM (justified) it still smokes most games I run but again - I do 1440 almost exclusively, and disabled ray tracing for the lost part. It's a giant leap up from my 1070 which honestly was fine, but could only do 1080p 50-60fps for most games when I finally upgraded, and def struggled with some of the newer games.
Ahh you said performance mode was getting 20-30, I think that may have been a typo?
Horizon gets a pretty solid 30, but it’s much better at 40 for sure in the performance mode. Ghost you should just run in performance mode also, it’s a PS4 game, so it can crank the graphics pretty high and still get a solid 60fps. I don’t think I’ve ever even tried the quality mode in that one. Returnal is 60fps no matter what if I remember, but I could be wrong. Most games run at 60 in performance, which is why I was confused when you said 20-30. Performance mode will also automatically adjust internal resolution while still outputting 4k in most cases, so you still get your interface at native resolution. Demons Souls for example, runs at 1440p60 with 4k interface and it’s so gorgeous.
Oh yes that's my fault, I meant quality mode for anywhere I said that I don't get 60 fps pretty much. I feel like I get 50-60 in performance mode on horizon but some of the more lish sections are pretty bad. I run basically every game in performance mode because to me the smoother experience in play is worth the dip in graphical fidelity.
Yeah Horizon really struggles when you’re trying to get 60, it’s much more stable at the 40fps 120hz mode, but that only helps like… 3% of people at most.
Yeah I think that’s definitely what we should thrive to achieve, 4K @ 30fps is stupid, frames per second are way more noticeable than pixel density on most gaming setups
I just want to know about the ONE real world use for bouncing light. Probably referring to research so groundbreaking that it shifted our entire understanding of the nature of light if not the universe in general.
Just small stuff like that 🤷
Light bouncing off titties?
Get this man a research grant!
Take my money right now!!
I know you're joking but it's extremely useful in medical imaging techniques and for earth observation.
Yeah I know, that was actually the main point my joke was alluding to 😁
"That useless thing is just the basis of visibility itself" 😄
I just want my eye candy sometimes :(
I'm a bit behind the times game wise, can anyone explain how I turn on RTX in Doom?
I think it's only in eternal? It's just a simple toggle in the settings as long as your hardware supports it.
can somebody please ELI5 ray tracing for me. Yes I have googled and am only more confused
Instead of applying filters over textures once, ray tracing literally simulates photons bouncing all over the place every single frame
*Instead of developers having to use thousands of tricks, filters, shortcuts, and post-processing algorithms very carefully arranged and stacked, ray tracing simulates light waves to arrive at the same end result the same way the world actually works.
Ultimately, ray tracing will mean the vast simplification (and therefore cost reduction) of the way visuals in games are produced. Which I'd wager is why it's being pushed so hard.
Basically, a scene in a game has a bunch of objects in it.
It's not to hard to just light them, but it doesn't look that good. Most games want to have shadows, reflections, that sort of thing.
The traditional approach is to use a bunch of extra manual work by pre-calculating a bunch of stuff.
Ray tracing works by simulating how physical photons bounce around in real life. It's existed for a long time; they've used it in animated movies for decades.
The issue with games is that we haven't had hardware capable of doing it in real time until quite recently.
Edit:
That is to say, if you want to animate water or a mirror with ray tracing, you know where the camera is in the scene, and you know where the water/mirror is, so you know the angle the reflection would have come from. So you bounce the photon back that way til you get to the light source.
Rather than have someone paint a light and shadow to lighten the weight of processing graphics on your machine they are leaving ai to do it.
AI comes with a price. Which is why bit coin was the problem on energy grid. In the case of raytracing it's nailing your pc hard and it offers no gain
Ray tracing isn't about AI, it's about the physics of photons.
Sure not going to argue. Though it is still drawing on computing power much how ai does which is the point of the post pointing out how it drives hard on gaming boxes.
You can go back to measuring marios inseam now.
That makes about as much sense as saying that a truck and excavator both draw a lot on engine power, so, same difference.
Or that both ray tracing and brute force decryption require a lot of compute so they're basically the same.
Although in this case Nvidia's ray-tracing does actually utilize AI. Both for image upscaling as well as (iirc) optimizing the number of rays needed to be cast for a mostly accurate image.
Can all of you leave the rays alone and stop trying to trace them? It's hard enough to be a living pancake swimming along the ocean floor.
And don't go bothering Ray either. He's a nice guy and doesn't deserve your BS.
The first one of these was really funny but none of the derivates that came after ever reached that level.
I turned off raytracing in 2077 and immediately had a playable experience. So what if the reflections aren't good? They fixed this on switch with SSAO, and that's a cheap way to fix it
Apparently the new hotness is Ray Marching, basically Ray tracing with circles
Are you sure? The way I understand it, ray marching is not something that can really replace ray/pathtracing, it's mainly used for rendering signed distance fields which is cool if you want to draw fractals and stuff, but not very efficient for classical geometry
Unirronically I agree with this. I still have yet to see a use case of ray tracing that makes it worth the 50% hit in fps.
A lot of the implications for ray tracing are on the dev-side of things. It's a bit hard to explain without going into technical details.
Essentially, getting light to look "right" is very very hard. To do it, devs employ a lot of different techniques. One of those older techniques is baking the light on static objects, essentially pre-rendering where light goes and how it bounces. This has been done for a long time, e.g. even in Half-Life, the lights are baked for static geometry. So in a way, we have been using ray-tracing in games for a long time. however, it isn't real time ray-tracing, as the information gets stored in light map textures, so there is no performance impact other than storing the texture in RAM/VRAM and drawing the texture together with others.
The inherit problem of that technique is that it only really works for static geometry. If you move your light or any objects in the scene, your lightmaps will no longer match. To solve this, there are mixed modes which use real-time lights, dynamic light maps, and other tricks. However, these are often subject to problems and/or the limitations of using real-time lights. Real-time light problems are: You can only do a limited number before getting a serious performance impact, especially if the lights produce shadows. Soft shadows, shadows in big areas, and very detailed shadows are extremely hard to do as well without some advanced tricks. Also, ambient occlusion and global illumination is not something you can just give lights (there is screen-space GI and AO, but they don't look good in all circumstances, and you have limited control. There are also some other techniques some engines did for real time GI.).
Also there is the problem of baked light affecting dynamic objects, such as characters. This has been solved by baking so called "light probes". These are invisible spheres that store the light data and the closest data then gets applied to the characters and other dynamic objects. This again has a some problem, as it's hard to apply multiple light probes to the same object, so lighting might be off. Also, light direction is not accurate, which causes normal maps to look very flat in this light, and local shadows do not work using light probes. The same is done for reflections using reflection probes which are static. These are 360° "screen shots" essentially storing the reflection at that point in space. This however costs DiskSpace/RAM/VRAM, and it will not hold any information for moving objects (that's why sometimes you can't see yourself in the mirror in games). Also, the reflections sometimes look "out of place" or distorted when the reflection probe is too far from the reflecting surface (again, these cost VRAM and RAM so you don't want to place them in front of every single reflective surface). It costs a lot of time to find the right balance. For the rest, usually screen space reflections are used, as any other real-time reflection is extremely costly as you essentially render the whole scene again for each local reflection. Screen space reflection is an advanced technique that works very well for stuff like reflective floors, but you will quickly see its downsides on very mirrored surfaces as it lacks information that is not on the screen. Some games like Hitman for example use the mix of those techniques extremely well.
Coming back to lighting, there are now better techniques used for example by unreal and some other engines (and now unity in experimental). The light gets stored in more predictable data structures, such as 3d textures. This way, you can store the direction of all light in each cell. The light then gets applied to the objects passing through those cells. This looks pretty good, and the runtime cost is fairly low, but the storage cost of such textures is a tradeoff of texture resolution and fidelity. These textures cost a lot of VRAM to store and without using advanced techniques and tricks, have their own limits (e.g. for scene size). It also costs a lot of time to create each time you change the scene, and it also doesn't eliminate all problems mentioned above, like reflections, moving lights, etc.
Specifically, there is the problem of character lighting itself. Using light probes on characters usually looks pretty bad, as it removes a lot of detail of advanced skin shaders. Even with the above mentioned techniques, character lighting is still extremely hard to do. There is also some other problems, like ambient shadow in already shadowed areas, and light balancing for character versus scene lighting.
For that reason, most AAA games use separate light rigs for characters. Essentially floating lights that ONLY affect the character and move with them. When the mixing with the scene lights is done right, the rig adapts to the current situation in terms of light direction, color, and intensity. If you look in most AAA games, you can often see situations where rim-light comes from a direction where there is no actual light source. However, this way, the devs and artists have full control over lighting the characters. Essentially like a real movie production would have, but without the limitation of the real world.
Now, ray-tracing as you know it right now is not quite there yet, but eventually, ray tracing is the solution to a lot of the problems mentioned above. Things like polygon density, light count, global illumination, ambient occlusion, light direction, reflections, and much more are simply "there" for you to use. Now this doesn't mean that it will automatically make everything look great, but with the overwhelming amount of different tricks that have to be used for current gen games to make the look good, it opens a whole new world of possibilities.
Also, something that will not directly influence the final game, it will eventually simplify things for devs so that more time can be invested into other things.
At this current usage of ray-tracing, it's more like a gimmick, because devs will still focus most resources on the current ways to use light. This is because most people don't have cards with sufficient ray-tracing capabilities. So for the moment, I agree that the performance hit is not worth it. However, eventually it might become the default way to draw games. While we are not quite there, in terms of performance, I think that things might become a lot more consistent and predictable eventually for raytracing.
YES, thank you! You saved me a lot of writing haha
This is spot on and the real advantage of ray tracing - when it becomes the norm it'll look better, provide effects that are extremely difficult or impossible and do so with minimal dev pain.
Worth mentioning that we're also about halfway on the average time for these big features to hit significant saturation, like with PhysX. It's pretty common for a GPU (and sometimes CPU/Chip set) to take 3-4 generations to trickle down enough through new products and used product sales to have decent enough depth/usage. At this point depending on how Apple is handling ray tracing, they might slow down the transition away from rasterized.
Awesome and great explanation for a layperson. Because the industry has been faking lighting for so long and lighting is quite important, the industry has become incredibly good at it. But it also takes a lot of development time that could be spent on adding more content or features. There's a reason the opinion about ray tracing is extremely positive within the game development industry. But also nobody's expecting it to become the norm over night, and the period with hybrid support for both raytracing and legacy lighting is only just starting.
Remember PhysX back when it was a separate
card Physics Processing Unit before they shoved it on the GPU before they even had multithreading? Yea it evolved. But the original implementation was not ideal.
Cyberpunk 2077's RT Overdrive mode looks absolutely insanely good.
Can't wait to play it on a graphics card I can afford in 20 years or so.
Me just quietly waiting for AMD to get competitive with ray tracing
Honestly all of the "it runs badly even on a 4090" stuff is talking about 4K with all the settings maxed - It runs at a solid minimum 30 for me at 1440p on my 3080 at nearly ultra settings. As long as you're not expecting 60FPS at 4K, you can enable RT overdrive on affordable hardware.
Raytracing is good but the problem is that were are in a transitional period (and Nvidia keeps upselling it's products)
This u?
The problem with raytracing is that it's real strengths are in places where traditional rendering doesn't work at all. As soon as raytraced games stop needing a rasterized option, raytracing will really become useful. Most of it's advantages are around dynamic scenes where you can't just bake the lighting, or reflections which without raytracing will break if you look at them slightly wrong.
Edit: Most of the minecraft raytracing implementations are lacking in my opinion, but minecraft is a game that is well suited for raytracing. Really just anything with a dynamic world.
Yup, I have a 3090 and even then I don't bother with RTX. It's a gimmick Jensen and Nvidia love to push as a must have feature. In reality you don't notice it if you're playing a game normally, it's a "stop and smell the roses" feature you only turn on to check out once and turn off immediately when you get frame dips.
How can you implement anything meaningful with ray tracing when shocker, not everyone can use ray tracing. Games are unfortunately designed for the median crowd. I would argue maybe the next console generation shall be that point when ray tracing is the norm. We have seen this fairly recently with SSDs, where they floated around for nearly 10-14 years in the consumer market being a cool piece of tech but most games were being designed for a hard disk except now most consoles have SSDs as the base standard, so this means the game can be designed around that specification and take advantage of it. Even though I am a PC stan, I understand consoles have a huge impact on the gaming industry.
That is why they came up with DLSS and then the frame generation. But of course it's proprietary tech confined to the newest most expensive cards by Nvidia. Utterly useless
Are we going to ignore FSR and XESS probably wouldn't have existed without this push? Like even if you don't use Ray tracing I think its fair to say you can benefit from DLSS (even though one can argue its a cheap gimmick to raise your fps count) but having it as an option is a good thing.
Frame interpolation is still a weird one to me.
Like, with how the latency is obviously still tied to the base framerate, and the fact that lower framerates mean less information to calculate good interpolated frames from...
Basically, the tech is at its worst for low-end hardware that needs it the most. (Which is probably why they chose to restrict it to new models, now that I think about it)
A 4090 owner turning on DLSS3 is kinda like a dental surgeon getting a third car for their birthday.
Upscaling has come a long way though, and the anti-aliasing they use in DLSS is so good, they've released it as a standalone feature. That I can appreciate, anything is better than what some games do with TAA.
Spider-Man 2 has launched with ray tracing always on and looks and plays phenomenally. Super immersive to swing around the city and have proper reflections off all the skyscrapers!
Ray Traced particles are pretty cool in Returnal and Control.
Getting the vibe that OP is being serious while using a template supposed to be ironic.
Seems odd to be angry about game graphics progressing. Imagine how it was during the 90s.
You may not like it, but Lara Croft pyramid boobs is peak graphics
"Pyramid" boobs and "peak" graphics.
I like what you did there ;)
This comment is right (and left) on point.
And if they are serious it doesn't make sense, ray tracing, path tracing, global illumination, make a game leaps and bounds more enjoyable for me. Realistic lighting is everything, I cannot wait for the day they finally get the new global illumination system in star citizen...
games should look like they were made for the ps2 or else im not buying
PS1 or bust
Best console, best graphics:
As someone who grew up with a Commodore 64 I present Bruce Lee
(oddly I can't upload gifs so apologies for the link)
I grew up with one too, but I didn't have that game.
On the other hand, there was Jumpman...
For quite literally years I couldn't remember the name of that game so thank you! I use VICE these days as an emulator and one of my friends had that game but literally couldn't remember the name.
No problem. There was also Jumpman Jr., which was basically just the same game but with new levels.
I remember that too. So many memories... Curious as to whether you were an Amiga person too? I've found Commodore wasn't very well known at all in the US but the UK, Australia and most of Europe it was super popular.
I had an Amiga 1000 and A590 hard drive after they were obsolete, but it was almost solely used for writing (probably terrible) music with OctaMed. A friend had an Amiga 500 and it was pretty cool. There was also, oddly, an Amiga dealer on the square in the Indiana town where we lived and we got to be friendly with them. I used to hang out in their store and play with the CD32. There was a pretty fun game called, I think, Psychopath, where you're being chased by a serial killer.
I also had a friend when I was younger whose mother pirated pretty much every C64 game for him. It was amazing how many games he had. He eventually got tired of me coming over because I only wanted to play with all of his C64 games.
Hahaha, I remember OctaMed. My older brothers had A500s then A1200s. I had a CD32 for a while too until realised it was a dead platform (although Liberation kicked arse).
I know that feeling lol, I had 'friends' who were only friends because they got games from Singapore and the UK and I'd just want to pirate them but we weren't actually friends.
i don't see the benefit of raytracing....
Do you have a gpu that can run max raytracing at 1440p - 100+ fps?
I'm not saying it's a worthwile investment, but if you CAN run it well... you're going to.
What gpu can actually run 100fps with rt on 1440p?
Yes I did, still choosed to run games without raytracing on ultra without any upscale. Of course I did notice some (imho!) minor nice lighting and refraction stuff with raytracing, but for me these never justified the performance loss and the soft look of an upscaled image.
Therefore I'd rather choose not to play with raytracing and I don't have the feeling that I miss something :)
The biggest reason your not seeing much benefit is because a) the tech hasn't matured to a point where rasterization techniques can't produce the same effect and b) devs aren't developing games with raytracing in mind.
Honestly, the most impressive examples of raytracing have been Nvidias tech demos, more specifically Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft RTX textures.
It's gonna take time for raytracing to impress but when it does it's going to blow your mind.
It'll happen right after server meshing!
Don't worry. S42 is feature complete.
Sure it is.
I
answered the callheld the line!I don't think so, it's clearly an ironically hyperbolic statement
I don't know man, some people unironically thinks the earth is flat, that if a supernova happened in our galaxy the earth would blow up or that Volkswagen is pronounced with an English v and not with f despite listening to a German explain the German v. You can never tell when it comes to internet strangers.
Most of the comments (at least when I opened the post) were talking about RT as if it all does is ruining performance and shouldn't be used.
This, but unironically. Games don't even need such realistic graphics, anyway - I'd much rather play a stylized or even 2d game where the devs focused on mechanics and fun, rather than pretty lights.
Minecraft, ULTRAKILL, Undertale, Celeste
all of them some of the best games in my opinion, how many use ray tracing? ZERO.
Hollow Knight, Crosscode, Hades, Dead Cells, Signalis, Dusk, Outer Wilds, Underrail, and more are all great examples of relatively modern games that kill it in the graphical department without using anything fancy.
Edit, because this is fun: Boltgun, Sea of Stars, the Bloodborne PS1 demake, Tunic, and more.
Minecraft shaders look great though, especially the rtx one for bedrock. If it was more open source, I'm sure ray tracing would be great to implement into shaders.
i was talking about unmodded java edition
Celeste still has really nice lighting in places, imo, but you are right, it all just comes from good colour choice and artistic skill, not some premade graphics option that they flipped on.
fuck graphics all games should be text-based from now on
$ crawlZork was the shit.
Text-based minecraft
Right, but then someone will rebuild Minecraft in text-based Minecraft with a 3D rendering engine displayed through ASCII
Sounds doable. Something like 192x108 characters should work great on software rasterizer. For heavy loads you can use paletted mode of GPU.
Half of the shit that is praised today are basically subpar rendered movies with little gameplay elements.
Might aswell play a visual novel and atleast get a good story instead.
Don't worry bro just turn on fake frames and upscaling. Now we get shitty graphics AND raytracing at the same time!
The weird hybrid solutions that game devs are coming up with to beat out the old tech without doing full RTX is awesome. And for that reason I like RTX, because its pushing development of ideas that work better for today's hardware and today's applications.
Raytracing is genuinely cool as hell, but Nvidia needs to stop being a dumb cunt about it
Nvidia is succeeding (in business) by being cunts, In don't know if they will ever not be cunts. 😂
But you can still buy freesync and g sync monitors, however it seems freesync won that battle. It'll be a matter of time.
Don't even get me started on adaptive sync. New Gsync monitors are finally capable to run VRR with AMD gpus now. Why do they bother still making them, then?
After playing Portal RTX and Quake 2 RTX, my opinion is that what we really need are games that fully embrace RTX as their rendering. Lower poly count, use materials more, lean in onto the cool lighting.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077 use RTX, but it's just painted over so it is very expensive for what it brings to the table. Sure it's more accurate and having reflections is neat, but it costs more than some shadow maps and doesn't beat good artistic design.
Yea were still in that transition period. One of the other problems is having RTX requirements only. Eventually the GTX cards will have to die out in order for this to be achieved though.
Yeah, we will only start seeing games that fully rely on raytracing when low-mid tier GPUs will be able to support at least current day RTX 3070 performance. As in, you can do better but at least you can run stuff fully in raytracing.
RTX in Spider-Man/Miles Morales on PC was... Amazing.
Being able to see yourself swinging by windows in realtime, shadows from buildings...
It was worth the FPS hit.
You know, that's fair. Most of my experience with RTX in games so far been in first person shooters and they're kind of lacking in environments like those.
Mostly stuff like slightly better lighting in Cyberpunk or the flickery caustics in recent Robocop game. Bonus points for the games that implement RTX reflections and shadows but don't have your character reflect or cast a shadow.
This feels like one of those "VR in the 90s was shit so we should never develop VR" kind of things.
It's really moreso that raytracing nowadays is intensely poorly implemented when there is usually better ways to go about it.
We have the means to be efficient about our graphics. But instead we go about it in the most unoptimized ways imaginable
That's exactly my point. Raytracing is being shoehorned into things without them being optimised specifically for it at the moment. That doesn't mean we should stop developing the tech entirely because people are implementing it poorly most of the time.
How do you "optimize' it? You would think with so many game companies using it that if there was a better way than there would be at least one title with optimized ray tracing. The issue is the computational requirements for convincing ray tracing. When Toy Story 1 was rendered originally it took 45 minutes to 3 hours to render a single frame of video. Give it time and the GPUs will eventually be fast enough. Baby steps with new tech.
Optimization is not an on/off switch. All companies are optimising their implementation to the best of their ability/budget. As coders get more familiar with the tech and it becomes more commonplace, as well as work being done by graphics card companies on their drivers, it will reduce the computational requirements over time. There's a hell of a lot of work that goes into graphical processing on hardware, software, engine and game levels to make things look better for less computations, it's not just "tell GPU to do simulate every particle from the sun".
There's also the other side of the issue. As tech gets better, devs are less incentivised to optimise their crap. Which leads to games that look and function the same as older games, but are now bloated beyond belief.
It's a strange paradox of tech innovation. The more powerful our tech becomes, the less we feel like properly utilizing said tech.
Vr is the 3D cinema of gaming
When I got my oculus quest I played it as often as possible. That’s the problem though, it just doesn’t make sense to play it almost ever.
If I were a teenager or someone who lived alone I could really get into it. The problem is disconnecting entirely from everyone around me for a game.
With my Steam Deck or my Switch, I can put my kid on my lap and play. I can sit it down easily and help my wife with a chore. I can walk around at work in my downtime and play.
VR is awesome. I absolutely love it. I just don’t have time to fuck with it. I would imagine that’s the case for most people.
I have two kids and very little gaming time, but more than 75% of that time I spend in VR. With the increased immersion/escapism I have completely abandoned desktop gaming. Playing FPS on desktop just feels silly now
I guess it really depends on lifestyle and career and age of children and all that.
I get really stressed when I disengage from my family for too long and can’t see what’s going on around me.
I’ve played VR at work. It’s fine for single player games where I can pause and come back. Multiplayer games get really frustrating though when every 5 minutes you’re being pulled out and you can’t just jump back in.
I love VR. I just can’t seem to find the time to fully immerse and escape.
I agree with you on shooters. I am insanely good at Pavlov and when I jump into something else (non vr) it just feels so restrained. Moving around and actually feeling like you’re firing your weapon is a big deal. I’d like to get something to attach my controllers to at some point with some weight so it feels even better.
Yeah my play sessions are usually when everyone is in bed so cutting myself off from other humans isn't an issue! Looking at my backlog of games that require longer sessions and it's just not gonna happen with my current lifestyle.
A few years back when I had more time I messed around in Skyrim with a controller taped to a weighty staff. Managed to get it lined up perfectly in game and the trigger was usable. Using phones as motion sensors so I could walk without using a second controller. And voice control spells. That shit was crazy fun, and obviously incredibly dangerous heh. Can't wait till VR is mainstream and we get more cool controller hardware.
I am son disappointed that 3D TV is dead. For few movies or documentaries it was brilliant. Exploring a prehistoric cave for example. Hopefully we still can play 3D with VR
Same here, it's just a great evolution of gaming. 2D gaming is actually starting to feel obsolete the more I play VR.
I too have a family and a job and lots of things to do, and I still find time to do the cool stuff I want to do like VR. The "isolation" that the other person is talking about is not an issue for me because I can stay aware of people around me with my ears and stuff.
3D cinema is more like light gun games. Kinda cool but it doesn't really advance anything.
Man, now I've said that I miss the old Namco arcades.
Correct. This meme templates is a unreasonable Statement paired with outdated arguments and modern images/facts poking fun at idiots. It also commonly confounds the reason for the thing with something easily observable.
Isn’t VR still pretty shit?
It's expensive, but a high end rig with a good headset (index or vive), it's pretty great.
I'm surprised they didn't go with the fact that ray tracing shoots rays out of the camera rather than having light radiate from light sources.
"That's a scientifically outdated view of how light works! Light enters your eyes, not the other way around! What is this? Emission theory? Are we back in the 1600s? They've played us for absolute fools."
That's clever. Only trace the rays that the camera can see and probably cheaper to send some rays from the camera to the sun than vice versa.
Exactly ! this makes the problem potentially millions of times easier, since you know with certainty that every ray fired is going to contribute to the image, whereas firing rays from the light source would guarantee you never see most of them, the processing power is wasted and your image never converges
Counterpoint: I like pretty lights and don't mind having to play at a suboptimal framerate if it means more detail that I'm going to notice and enjoy.
Also, I keep seeing people confusing photorealism with a lack of style, when that's just not true. Pixar movies for example are photorealistic but stylized. You can have fancy lights and cool styles.
I disagree that pixar movies are photorealistic... They're pretty solidly on the cartoon side of things
Pixar movies have accurate lighting which makes them look great. Lighting separates a good looking game from a great looking game and is more important than textures imo.
Main point aside, that isn't photorealism tho. Photorealism is depicting something almost identical to a real life photograph or simply what most consider realistic graphics.
I would consider photorealism to mainly be light-based (prefix photo meaning light), but I get what you mean. I'd consider photorealism and realism to be separate. "I can see that existing" vs "I can see myself being there"
A better example probably would've been claymation, or pokemon concierge.
Edit: my definition of photorealism might be off.
Yeah I got your point but pretty sure photo in photorealism is just photograph. Not sure if there are any term like that for realistic lighting tho.
Raytracing produces realistic visual effects without requiring tricks like ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, shadow resolution and so on, since those emerge as a result of raytracing anyway and are much more realistic. I'm currently rendering a Donut in Blender where the effects are clearly visible in comparison.
However, due to the high amount of optimization in visually impressive realtime rendering engines like game engines, I agree with you that I don't see many benefits comparing ray tracing in games with contemporary alternative techniques.
Nevertheless I think that's the future. In the long run, there's nothing better, i.e. more accurate, than simulating the behavior of light when it comes to visual realism.
Also, baked lighting has another cost - nothing that is baked can be dynamic, and it has to be done during development, so it takes up dev resources.
Raytraced stuff happens immediately without tricks. All you need is the geometry and the materials to be accurate, and it should look right, no questions asked.
Once we get to a point where raytracing can be assumed even for low end systems, the problem where systems can't run certain games could become a thing of the past. I mean, if manufacturers weren't constantly bombarding us with planned & perceived obsolescence.
in the case where you have vehicles with explorable interiors (like the ships in Star Citizen), lighting has to be dynamic because lighting conditions change just as a result of flying around normally. The position of the sun in whichever of the two (current) star systems you're in relative to your ship, and the atmosphere which may or may not be present outside, the position of cargo and objects/materials that will be receiving light and causing it to diffuse onto surrounding surfaces in a cabin also requires at least some kind of reference or it just feels BAD.
But the recent citizencon engine presentation showed some AMAZING new short cuts that give just enough visual fidelity without tanking the framerate that it scratches some kind of itch DEEP within the predictive modeling of the human mind... when light acts more like it's supposed to, it's fucking magical.
Eh, pathtracing is pretty cool, and when used correctly, it can lead to real amazing results, while the artist does not have to care about performance as much. Baked lighting is very nice for static scenes, but it also consumes a lot of storage.
Godot's SDFGI seems like a good tradeoff, particularly as it works well on not-super-new GPUs (Juan: "but you can run them great on something old, like an gtx960 or a rx450 and get pretty real-time lighting at 1080").
It's brilliant.
It's not really that dynamic yet though, but I looked at their presentation where they talked about future features and they said that support for dynamic objects will be coming. I'm pretty excited about where its going.
They originally planned to get the improvements out in 4.1 but it looks like they haven't gotten around to it yet. https://github.com/orgs/godotengine/projects/33/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=12571576
Sdfgi is pretty cool, (I develope with Godot), but for now it's still really hard to figure out the right settings for it to not be a gigant splat fest... Cuz it leaves splats of color all around the place. Outside scenes work a lot better though, so that's cool.
cyberpunk has a path tracing setting and it gives me even worse performance than ray tracing 😭
that's because it's more intensive than Ray Tracing.
hello I would like to run my games at 1 quarter framerate please
True, it does tank performance a lot. For that though, you are getting actual realistic lighting, which makes certain scenes look like absolute garbage, since these scenes were designed with the "fake lighting" in mind.
To be fair, lighting is the most important part of generating photorealistic graphics. Having realistic and real-time lighting makes it look so much more realistic
We had a tool for that: it was called IMAGINATION
The graphical fidelity fetish has complete ruined gamers' ability to immerse themselves in make believe worlds without the game doing all the work for us
My tone is /s, but despite my hypocrisy I do believe this is half true
Its not like games that tried to be realistic before didn't exist and not like games that purposely go for a non realistic style now are not a thing. I'm pretty sure we have more pixel style graphics games coming out now yearly than when they were actually a thing.
We have more indie pixel games coming out yearly than all of the original consoles put together during their lifetime I'm pretty sure.
I wouldn't be surprised. You probably have young people making games that have nostalgia for games made in the style of 8bit, more than the games that were made that way because of tech constraints.
"Fake it till you make it". Using various techniques it is possible to simulate a fake ray tracing. It doesn't need to look as real as in real life, just similar enough so you wouldn't notice during gameplay.
AI frame gen and AI upscaling is what I am most excited about...
Counterargument: my 3090 is my space heater
This, I can't run my pc in the summer, makes the room far too hot
Ray Tracing is awesome
Yeah I met Ray back at a comiccon in '99. Really down to earth but very bright guy. No room for any disrespect, and his wife Judy is a gem too.
Just a side note: simulating light in a 3D environment is the stuff you could use to write a fucking phd, no joke. And another if you can figure a way to make the algorithm faster
And if you do either of those, most games companies would love to snap you up right out of graduation.
And then lay you off when shareholders don’t like the cost of paying for a PhD.
What a stupid comment.
Yeah, it is really dumb. Almost as bad as suggesting game companies are looking to onboard people during layoffs.
Counter, or maybe side, argument; the problem is that nobody has actually done it well. There is a very real difference to be made using real time pathtracing, but everyone is distracted by pretty lights.
counter counter or maybe side side argument, teardown had voxel destruction with ray tracing i think.
maybe not, the wikipedia article is a bit vague on it.
it says they were initially implemented with raytracing, but idk if that means the final game utilizes raytracing.
neat game though.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teardown_(video_game)
Is it a bit vague?
I think it's pretty clear, tbh.
ah yeah there ya go, twas used for lighting, which we were trying to find an example of other stuff.
oh well.
Am I the only one who thinks that Ray Tracing doesn't even look good?
My brother and I upgraded our computers recently. I went with bang for buck and got a 6600XT, he wanted the RT experience and got a 4070TI. Playing cyberpunk on his computer was disappointing tbh. I expected more from almost a 400% more expensive setup.
Apparently 90% of people can't even tell so...
Just tells you how many tricks have been developed to make rasterization look as good as it does. Fascinating, really. It's always interesting to see how people work around a limitation.
The thing with real-time raytracing and pathtracing is that instead of being a workaround, it removes the limitation entirely, which is damn cool.
Just need faster hardware still, which will take at least another decade with how Nvidia keeps milking the smallest improvements gen after gen.
This tracks with every other graphic option if the person doesn't know exactly what they're looking for, in my experience. Most options don't have such a huge impact, and are more just "yeah, that feels a bit better, I guess" once you get past the basic, obvious stuff like resolution.
I like the way insomniac does it with their games on PS5 : priority on hitting 60fps and then raytracing.
Honestly I like ray tracing but I like 60fps more. I don’t care about resolution tho, 1080p is good enough for me. 1440p if I really want to push it.
4K was invented by TV makers to sell 8k TVs
1440 @ 120hz is the absolute sweetspot for gaming idc what anyone says. 4k is completely unnecessary
1440 looks nice up close, on smaller screens, but it’s definitely not got the pixel density to compare to 4k on larger panels. Both have their place and use cases.
I realize everyone has their own preferences but I opt to run my PS5 in 1080p more often than not, and that's on a 55" 4K panel. To me the smoother experience is completely worth the trade off in density. I hate running things in performance mode and getting 20-30fps. It looks choppy, feels sluggish, and is an inferior gaming experience for just about every type of game in my experience. On desktop I also prefer to force 1440 when playing on the TV. That display can only do 60hz but still feels better to me. The desktop card can put out a much better 4K experience, but I still feel like it's not worth the fps drop. I'll take stable 60fps vs a wobbly 40-50 all day.
What ps5 games are you playing that get 20-30 fps in performance mode? All the ones I own, which is almost every major ps5 title, has performance modes that either do 60fps dynamic resolution, 1440p60 wrapped in 4k, or 40fps at 4k120, or dynamic 4k60. Some get 45+ on average with unlocked framerate and dynamic refresh rate.
What desktop card do you have? Must be a pretty pricey one to outperform the ps5 at 4k. My 2070 is smoked by the ps5. I’m going to upgrade to the 5070 when it comes out.
Does the ps5 still not support native 1440p? Is that why you pick 1080p?
Most games don't give the option of resolution, it's just "performance" or "quality" in the game menus. So I set the system to 1080p in the settings primarily because the PS5 thinks my display won't support 1440, which holds water because I have to force it on my desktop. I don't have the option to force on my PS5 I don't think. Do I?
And yeah, I get awful jittering on just about every quality mode but I don't think I've tried it since setting it to 1080. I probably should! The ones I know for sure were horizon FW getting CRAZY slow on quality, that was def 4K because it was one of the first games I got. Ghost of tsushima was a little better but iffy in entire sections of the game. Returnal was probably the best, and the only one I can remember not forcing to run in performance mode. Lords of the Fallen is most recent and it is BAD in quality mode. It's rough even in performance mode in big sections, but makes sense because it's one of the first UE5 games available.
My GPU is a Gigabyte 3070 of some kind. For all the hate it got for having low RAM (justified) it still smokes most games I run but again - I do 1440 almost exclusively, and disabled ray tracing for the lost part. It's a giant leap up from my 1070 which honestly was fine, but could only do 1080p 50-60fps for most games when I finally upgraded, and def struggled with some of the newer games.
Ahh you said performance mode was getting 20-30, I think that may have been a typo?
Horizon gets a pretty solid 30, but it’s much better at 40 for sure in the performance mode. Ghost you should just run in performance mode also, it’s a PS4 game, so it can crank the graphics pretty high and still get a solid 60fps. I don’t think I’ve ever even tried the quality mode in that one. Returnal is 60fps no matter what if I remember, but I could be wrong. Most games run at 60 in performance, which is why I was confused when you said 20-30. Performance mode will also automatically adjust internal resolution while still outputting 4k in most cases, so you still get your interface at native resolution. Demons Souls for example, runs at 1440p60 with 4k interface and it’s so gorgeous.
Oh yes that's my fault, I meant quality mode for anywhere I said that I don't get 60 fps pretty much. I feel like I get 50-60 in performance mode on horizon but some of the more lish sections are pretty bad. I run basically every game in performance mode because to me the smoother experience in play is worth the dip in graphical fidelity.
Yeah Horizon really struggles when you’re trying to get 60, it’s much more stable at the 40fps 120hz mode, but that only helps like… 3% of people at most.
Yeah I think that’s definitely what we should thrive to achieve, 4K @ 30fps is stupid, frames per second are way more noticeable than pixel density on most gaming setups
Ray Marching is awesome though https://piped.video/watch?v=9U0XVdvQwAI
Didn't quake bounce light 4 times?
Certainly not real-time. The colour lightmaps available with some video cards were baked in
The point is bounced light and global illuminaion was in games back then
Yeah but it was precalculated
Thanks, cap.
That's debatable. Kind of like saying Donkey Kong Country was 3D because it used sprites made from 3D models.
But I'm happy if we just have different interpretations of the same facts.
Real time RT really is meh, but I like what they're doing in CS2. Prebaked Global Illumination looks freaking fantastic.
Unironically yes.
I just want to know about the ONE real world use for bouncing light. Probably referring to research so groundbreaking that it shifted our entire understanding of the nature of light if not the universe in general.
Just small stuff like that 🤷
Light bouncing off titties?
Get this man a research grant!
Take my money right now!!
I know you're joking but it's extremely useful in medical imaging techniques and for earth observation.
Yeah I know, that was actually the main point my joke was alluding to 😁
"That useless thing is just the basis of visibility itself" 😄
I just want my eye candy sometimes :(
I'm a bit behind the times game wise, can anyone explain how I turn on RTX in Doom?
I think it's only in eternal? It's just a simple toggle in the settings as long as your hardware supports it.
can somebody please ELI5 ray tracing for me. Yes I have googled and am only more confused
Instead of applying filters over textures once, ray tracing literally simulates photons bouncing all over the place every single frame
*Instead of developers having to use thousands of tricks, filters, shortcuts, and post-processing algorithms very carefully arranged and stacked, ray tracing simulates light waves to arrive at the same end result the same way the world actually works.
Ultimately, ray tracing will mean the vast simplification (and therefore cost reduction) of the way visuals in games are produced. Which I'd wager is why it's being pushed so hard.
Basically, a scene in a game has a bunch of objects in it.
It's not to hard to just light them, but it doesn't look that good. Most games want to have shadows, reflections, that sort of thing.
The traditional approach is to use a bunch of extra manual work by pre-calculating a bunch of stuff.
Ray tracing works by simulating how physical photons bounce around in real life. It's existed for a long time; they've used it in animated movies for decades.
The issue with games is that we haven't had hardware capable of doing it in real time until quite recently.
Edit:
That is to say, if you want to animate water or a mirror with ray tracing, you know where the camera is in the scene, and you know where the water/mirror is, so you know the angle the reflection would have come from. So you bounce the photon back that way til you get to the light source.
Rather than have someone paint a light and shadow to lighten the weight of processing graphics on your machine they are leaving ai to do it.
AI comes with a price. Which is why bit coin was the problem on energy grid. In the case of raytracing it's nailing your pc hard and it offers no gain
Ray tracing isn't about AI, it's about the physics of photons.
Sure not going to argue. Though it is still drawing on computing power much how ai does which is the point of the post pointing out how it drives hard on gaming boxes.
You can go back to measuring marios inseam now.
That makes about as much sense as saying that a truck and excavator both draw a lot on engine power, so, same difference.
Or that both ray tracing and brute force decryption require a lot of compute so they're basically the same.
Although in this case Nvidia's ray-tracing does actually utilize AI. Both for image upscaling as well as (iirc) optimizing the number of rays needed to be cast for a mostly accurate image.
Can all of you leave the rays alone and stop trying to trace them? It's hard enough to be a living pancake swimming along the ocean floor.
And don't go bothering Ray either. He's a nice guy and doesn't deserve your BS.
The first one of these was really funny but none of the derivates that came after ever reached that level.
I turned off raytracing in 2077 and immediately had a playable experience. So what if the reflections aren't good? They fixed this on switch with SSAO, and that's a cheap way to fix it
Apparently the new hotness is Ray Marching, basically Ray tracing with circles
Are you sure? The way I understand it, ray marching is not something that can really replace ray/pathtracing, it's mainly used for rendering signed distance fields which is cool if you want to draw fractals and stuff, but not very efficient for classical geometry