Yeah, remember how well Mirror's Edge holds up so many years later? It's not just because of the color palette choices, it's because DICE worked like hell to bake lighting into that game in very static, constrained linear environments.
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Can I be honest here, I tried out Ray Tracing and it's not a big deal as some people make it out to be.
- Thread starter Derktron
- Start date
Problem is, if it comes soon it will run at 2fps :) Without really knowing, it feels like we're a couple+ GPU gens away from that at least.
"game testing suggests we should change this asset X and move wall Y"
"Oh fuck, well thats it folks start the baking again. And no more fucking playtesting now ok?"
...
"our playtesters say they want to be able to blow up the walls"
*laughs in baked GI-ish*
Yeah, why not just keep faking if it looks almost as good huh
Dont forget, the "fake lighting" tech uses performance too, in some cases in fact the majority of the frame budget. remove all that and we can have full RT on 3080, at 1440p at 45 fps gsynced, upscaled to 4k. Add in some funky new framerate upscaler from nvidia and it looks like 90 fps :)
"Oh fuck, well thats it folks start the baking again. And no more fucking playtesting now ok?"
...
"our playtesters say they want to be able to blow up the walls"
*laughs in baked GI-ish*
Yeah, why not just keep faking if it looks almost as good huh
No thats an exaggeration. With AI driven RT, like the one Nvidia uses, along with AI driven upscaling of resolution, we can have that on 3080 - mark my words.
Dont forget, the "fake lighting" tech uses performance too, in some cases in fact the majority of the frame budget. remove all that and we can have full RT on 3080, at 1440p at 45 fps gsynced, upscaled to 4k. Add in some funky new framerate upscaler from nvidia and it looks like 90 fps :)
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I don't think people really appreciate how large an effect this will have on development when it becomes reliable to implement with good performance.
I mean, that's basically been the case with general realtime lighting for a while. It's great, it's effective, but it still does have limited functionality. Most games use a mix of baked and realtime for a reason.
Like, not knockin' anything, I know the pains of lightbaking too well at this point. But realtime lighting even nowadays still has sufficiently limited application - we can get it so the player never notices, and that's awesome, but reliance on baked lighting still persists. I just don't see Raytracing superseding the more performative realtime lighting, which *still* has limited application (let alone the more limited application Raytracing has).
Raytracing is cool looks good, but that's that. Gameplay ramifications definitely exist, but I don't know how widely applicable they are. It's cool tech, not a gamechanger.
I dont get your post.
Yeah people have used mixed realtime and baked lighting for a reason - and that reason is that realtime raytracing hasn't been an option.
How do you think that "baked lighting" is created? Imagine how sweet it would be if we could, you know, bake in realtime.
also, what do you mean by "limited applications for realtime light"? You mean, except any game that has light? Baked lighting has zero advanages except performance (obviously). Performance is of course a huge advantage but we are getting there, closer and closer, to the point where it is no longer needed.
That's why I'm a DLSS 2.0 stan, RTX is a pleasant bonus to the true next-gen upgrade. Though RTX audio is literal magic.
OP
OP
Hey at least I'm not the only one who thinks it's useless. At least in some games that is.
People talking about ray tracing like it's a gimmick, meanwhile 3d rendering in non real time applications is always 100% ray tracing and people can't even make the difference between real and virtual. It's just that good.
In 2014 I was learning 3d modeling and rendering and I could pick materials off Autodesk's library, put them in a scene, add the lights and voilà, it looked basically photorealistic.
Once the pipelines will be ready, it will blow people's mind pretty hard. The latest Avengers movie is "all" CGI at the end. Imagine games looking like that.
In 2014 I was learning 3d modeling and rendering and I could pick materials off Autodesk's library, put them in a scene, add the lights and voilà, it looked basically photorealistic.
Once the pipelines will be ready, it will blow people's mind pretty hard. The latest Avengers movie is "all" CGI at the end. Imagine games looking like that.
I agree with you OP, that's why I'm not upgrading my 2000 series RTX to a 3000 one. I only got mine because my old gpu didn't cut it anymore.
My experience with it is either there's very few games making significant use of it, or I'm not super impressed by the rtx on off videos.
The only current game I have with it is shadow tomb raider and even with it in max I can't tell what's different. I suppose the strongest demo currently is control but I'm not buying it just for rtx. Maybe cyberpunk with its colorful neon lights.?
My experience with it is either there's very few games making significant use of it, or I'm not super impressed by the rtx on off videos.
The only current game I have with it is shadow tomb raider and even with it in max I can't tell what's different. I suppose the strongest demo currently is control but I'm not buying it just for rtx. Maybe cyberpunk with its colorful neon lights.?
It's impressive in a few ways, but shaders (java version only) have been doing most of what's in the RTX version and more. Two main things that are missing is the light bouncing/mixing and the true reflections. But I prefer the java version shaders in the end after using both. They give more "wow this looks good!" times.
Clearly games look better with raytracing enabled. But does the improvement in image quality justify the enormous performance hit at the moment? I'm not sure that it does yet, but I'm keeping an open mind about it.
This is how I feel. While the games do look better, its not worth the performance hit. I'll always prioritize higher framerate over better graphics.
At first I didn't care about ray tracing because the earlier cards were either way too expensive (2080ti) or just were not able to do it well without huge sacrifices to frame rates, plus very limited game support. I think moving forward it's going to be a lot more common but I want it all. 4K, at least 60fps and ray tracing but I don't want to spend a fortune.
The game looks beautiful, I don't know why some love to be abrasive online. I wish everyone would just enjoy videogames without the passive aggressiveness. I'm very fortunate to be able to enjoy this hobby.
Okay, tldr of baking in case it's not clear: You place lights down as if they were realtime lights, then you start the process which essentially 'snapshots' what the light hitting objects & materials looks like as textures for said objects. This is very efficient for static objects (that's all it's really for, realtime stuff gets Lightprobing which is pure evil!), as they get the 'depth' of a lit object but don't *need* to be lit.
However you probably haven't seen a game with exclusively baked lighting in ages - whether the player casting shadows, enemies casting shadows, day/night smooth cycles, all of them use some component of realtime lighting - the most common being a Directional light. This'd be the next most efficient as it provides realtime lighting where you need it, realtime shadows for what should cast it, and isn't very performance intensive. Games like Pre-World Monster Hunter used to run with no actual realtime lighting, but now run with mixed, with the directional lighting providing player & monster shadows, and the general ambient lighting of the area. The baked lighting otherwise handles dark areas, grading, and so on.
For most games, no matter where the player is, only a few light sources are active at any time, always capped for performance reasons: Things like Streetlights at night in games with dynamic cycles (or just to cast a shadow when the player enters), ambient flares, etc. Lots of usage. But you don't have super intense numbers galore because realtime lights are always very intensive. Realtime shadows too, are far more intensive. Games nowadays are great at balancing actual light count with what the player can see, so it's been perfectly fine for most games. After all, a street light 4 blocks away really doesn't need to cast shadows, so it doesn't. But if you don't use any form of baked lighting, areas in shadow may lack depth or even good color grading. A LoD may look super flat or just at odds with the upcoming LoDs when you've got proper lighting on it. I thiiink (don't quote me on this) the most recent Metro game suffered from something like this? I swear I saw a video about it with one of the complaints being that, but I honestly don't recall perfectly. Even if it's not an issue in Metro, it's one of the bigger issues with realtime-only games, as uniform lack of light doesn't look particularly great (Really it doesn't look great in real life either - turn off the lights in your room so it's dim and you'll see how 'mushy' the lighting can get, somehow we gloss over this in real life).
Anyway, what I'm overall trying to say is that baked lighting still has tons of use and realtime lights are great, they do their job superbly, but they haven't fully replaced Baked Lighting and Raytracing won't replace either in all likelihood. Some combination of the three are likely the future, rather than one superseding the others. Baking still has issues, it's far less quality than realtime, it takes sufficient file size, it's a tremendous pain to work with (Don't get me started on lightprobes). Realtime lights still has performance issues despite being higher quality, not taking much space at all, and being really easy to work with, and so assumedly does Raytracing (though I have no experience with employing Raytracing).
Likewise, it's the only functionally relevant graphical breakthrough that can lead to gameplay implications we've had in generations. Every thing up to this point as far as rasterized based rendering or programmable shaders is small potatoes compared to replicating the way that light works. The millions of different ways resolution and image quality and performance can be managed is something that will always have to be addressed until the end of time, that's the opposite of exciting.
I also have done so and have the opposite impression. To me, raytracing makes a bigger difference in games than any other graphical update over the last >10 years, perhaps since we went from no shaders to somewhere around SM3.0.
It is downplayed to a silly amount, because it is gargantuan.
It is downplayed to a silly amount, because it is gargantuan.
I think you're partially right for now TC.
BUT if you have the hw and can sport DLSS then ray tracing is within grasp. It's very expensive and is getting better and that's all the encouragement you need to know as it's only going to get better from here on out.
If you think about, CPU's aren't being fully utilized as well as memory like the new consoles. GPU is usually optimized well enough but with all the new direct storage and DX12U features you can bet this is going to help things immensely.
Back to the topic, I think there's some damn good examples of ray tracing we've been getting a tarde of on PC and to be fair to us here in the raster race (no pun intended 😱), our magnum opus is coming with Cyberpunk 2077.
Politics aside, that will be a showcase game for our fancy high end HW. I just hope they have optimizations to take advantage of the new features we've had on PC that no dev has managed to leverage yet.
BUT if you have the hw and can sport DLSS then ray tracing is within grasp. It's very expensive and is getting better and that's all the encouragement you need to know as it's only going to get better from here on out.
If you think about, CPU's aren't being fully utilized as well as memory like the new consoles. GPU is usually optimized well enough but with all the new direct storage and DX12U features you can bet this is going to help things immensely.
Back to the topic, I think there's some damn good examples of ray tracing we've been getting a tarde of on PC and to be fair to us here in the raster race (no pun intended 😱), our magnum opus is coming with Cyberpunk 2077.
Politics aside, that will be a showcase game for our fancy high end HW. I just hope they have optimizations to take advantage of the new features we've had on PC that no dev has managed to leverage yet.
Interestingly the industries that do do that are also moving more towards real time. Being able to see your results instantly is so much more easy to work with than having to wait for a render to finish at 640*480
I think it can look very nice, but sadly it is just too much of a hit on performance for me to actually use it.
This has probably been posted already, but I feel this video is required watching to understand the impact RT will have on games.
www.youtube.com
Also for people talking about performance hits, I see that people have already forgotten all about the Unreal Engine 5 demo shown on the PS5 some time ago.
www.youtube.com
To be clear, there are many different implementations of global illumination. Not all GI techniques are the same, and there are different degrees of ray tracing as well.
[4K] Metro Exodus PC/RTX Analysis: The Next Level In Real-Time Visuals
Tested on Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080 Ti.High praise indeed, but 4A Games' phenomenal engine, paired with Nvidia RTX ray tracing technology powers Metro Exodus o...
www.youtube.com
Also for people talking about performance hits, I see that people have already forgotten all about the Unreal Engine 5 demo shown on the PS5 some time ago.
Unreal Engine 5 Revealed! | Next-Gen Real-Time Demo Running on PlayStation 5
Unreal Engine 5 empowers artists to achieve unprecedented levels of detail and interactivity, and brings these capabilities within practical reach of teams o...
www.youtube.com
To be clear, there are many different implementations of global illumination. Not all GI techniques are the same, and there are different degrees of ray tracing as well.
Metro Exodus, Minecraft RTX and Quake 2 RTX currently have the most impressive implementations of Ray Tracing so far. Quake 2 RTX looks absolutely incredible (especially for a game that came out 13 years ago). Control also makes great use of Ray Tracing, though I was not impressed as much as with the three aforementioned games.
I'm playing Watch Dogs Legion and before that, Control, and RTX has been a game changer to me. I'm normally one that reduces shadows because when I'm playing in the moment, I don't notice them, and that's probably true of RTX when I'm, say, in the middle of a gun fight. But when I'm just traversing the game's space I'm constantly in awe of how RTX looks.
Here are some shots I took just this morning while playing Legions.
Note that I'm under a bridge here, and the wet/dry asphalt. Note also how just perfect the reelections are under the vehicles and the buildings.
Even in buildings it's just wowza.
And here is a shot from Control:
I did play Metro Exodus first, it was at the time I got my 3080 RTX card the only RTX game I owned, and it didn't seem much different. The lighting/shadows looked incredible, but not a lot of light in the early part of the game I was in before I moved onto other games, so I don't have a lot of experience with it, but I've heard good things about it so I presume it's the open world/day levels (particularly the swamp/water stuff) that looks just crazy.
Here are some shots I took just this morning while playing Legions.
Note that I'm under a bridge here, and the wet/dry asphalt. Note also how just perfect the reelections are under the vehicles and the buildings.
Even in buildings it's just wowza.
And here is a shot from Control:
I did play Metro Exodus first, it was at the time I got my 3080 RTX card the only RTX game I owned, and it didn't seem much different. The lighting/shadows looked incredible, but not a lot of light in the early part of the game I was in before I moved onto other games, so I don't have a lot of experience with it, but I've heard good things about it so I presume it's the open world/day levels (particularly the swamp/water stuff) that looks just crazy.
100% which is why i think it's weird for people to downplay RT so much. Performance hit i get but that will get better over time.
People keep bringing up the "massive hit to the framerate" but buddy I've been playing games at 1440p60-120fps with RTX on since I got this 2080 Super. It's been completely fine mixed with DLSS. People need to learn to stop expecting Ultra settings on every game and even then, it looks like Watch Dogs Legion would be the only game I'd have to turn down other than Microsoft Flight Sim and they're both just insanely heavy games no matter what.
Oh yeah. Never mind 4k or HDR or anything. It really embodied the gif from Interstellar when a small mistake could cost a week of work even for very very small clips.
That's just it. Ray Tracing is here too early and being pushed too aggressively considering the hardware we have available right now. Specifically with PS5 and XSX. I don't want to see performance or resolution nearly halved in my games because of Ray Tracing, I think that power could be put to better use in an endless amount of ways.
It's still super, super early days. I'm impressed we even have real time ray tracing at all, I didn't expect it for at least another 5 years, but what do I know.. anyway it's going to take a long time (and it'll be pretty gradual) for it really mature and become an essential part of the pipeline. So I don't blame people who think it's not worth the cost right now.
I still think it does look really impressive in a few instances (Watch Dogs looks really good in number of ways, some really impressive examples).
This might be a bad analogy, but I feel like where we're at with real ray tracing today is where we were at with 3d gaming with DOOM (and other DOOM era games). Both technically impressive and really important for their time, but it's really just the beginning.
People do keep saying to watch the Marbles demo - and yes we know it's just a tech demo - and it isn't representative of what we'll see in games today, or probably anytime soon, but it begins to show the real potential of it. https://youtu.be/NgcYLIvlp_k
I still think it does look really impressive in a few instances (Watch Dogs looks really good in number of ways, some really impressive examples).
This might be a bad analogy, but I feel like where we're at with real ray tracing today is where we were at with 3d gaming with DOOM (and other DOOM era games). Both technically impressive and really important for their time, but it's really just the beginning.
People do keep saying to watch the Marbles demo - and yes we know it's just a tech demo - and it isn't representative of what we'll see in games today, or probably anytime soon, but it begins to show the real potential of it. https://youtu.be/NgcYLIvlp_k
I'm not normally wowed by some graphical improvements, but ray-tracing is definitely one which I think will be massive and really stunning. The performance cost is incredibly high, and arguably not worth it at the moment, but there's massive potential not only in making games look much better but also open up new gameplay possibilities which weren't as feasible before (primarily around the possibilities opened by using reflections in stealth games, horrors, and shooters).
I think it's still going to be quite awhile for it to really game-changing while waiting for hardware to catch up, but I think there's a massive amount of potential once the performance hit becomes justifiable and heavily adopted (I think that'll still be five to ten years away in the console-space, but I could definitely see some smaller indie games taking advantage of it for new gameplay mechanics, and large budget PC games utilising it for incredible scenes, to really drive-home the value and push it towards the norm). I could certainly see a game in the Half Life series (if another ever comes out) making ray tracing a key component of its gameplay system in the same way the physics system did for Half Life 2 and VR did for Half Life Alyx
I think it's still going to be quite awhile for it to really game-changing while waiting for hardware to catch up, but I think there's a massive amount of potential once the performance hit becomes justifiable and heavily adopted (I think that'll still be five to ten years away in the console-space, but I could definitely see some smaller indie games taking advantage of it for new gameplay mechanics, and large budget PC games utilising it for incredible scenes, to really drive-home the value and push it towards the norm). I could certainly see a game in the Half Life series (if another ever comes out) making ray tracing a key component of its gameplay system in the same way the physics system did for Half Life 2 and VR did for Half Life Alyx
Realistic material reflections are key to realistic graphics.
Doesn't seem like it now, because we aren't playing a bunch of stuff heavily using it. But once it becomes a main stay every game not using it (that goes for realistic graphics) is going to look very dated.
Doesn't seem like it now, because we aren't playing a bunch of stuff heavily using it. But once it becomes a main stay every game not using it (that goes for realistic graphics) is going to look very dated.
That's because hardware today isn't capable of real-time full path tracing in games yet. Most games that support RTX are using RT to enhance rasterizer-based rendering, which makes graphics somewhat more realistic and more correct, but full path tracing is on another level.
This is very shortsighted. There are lots of things you could remove from a game that would make it perform better. Why are you drawing the line at RTX? The reason is because devs spend hundreds of man hours trying to recreate what RTX gives you and have become very good at it. However when RTX is the default lighting the time saved in faking the lighting will be able to be put to use to make better looking games in other ways. For example, if you've ever built anything in Unreal you'd know how long it takes to rebake the lighting whenever you make changes to the scene. In the end that's a lot of time wasted just waiting around for things to rebake when that time could be put to use doing other stuff.
We're way too early into the life of this tech to declare "I dunno guys, raytracing ain't shit"
That's like looking at the cross-gen games on PS5 and saying "guys they don't even look that good. What's all the fuss???"
It takes time for the tech to be implemented and used in games.
That's like looking at the cross-gen games on PS5 and saying "guys they don't even look that good. What's all the fuss???"
It takes time for the tech to be implemented and used in games.
You will be amazed when future games will use it for all features and not just reflections and not just as an addon effect, especially if some games will mandate it to get used for gameplay like I explained so many times before.
