There are fundamental limitations with rasterized lighting approaches, which is why everyone has wanted ray tracing for so long. Sure, with enough time and money you can get close - in some instances - to ray traced lighting. The point is you don't need to shlep all that off to artists and micro-manage each scene with ray tracing like you have to do with more traditional approaches. As DF's video shows, you get shadow casting, tone correction, materials behavoir - all change dynamically just based on where the ambient lighting is and the intensity.
And again I point out that it's largely meaningless when comparing it to an actual game that's out now. These technologies are ultimately exciting to everyone here in so much that they'll eventually be utilized in the games we play, if not we would all be discussing the latest SIGGRAPH conference presentation.
As others have noted, it involves a lot of hacks setup on top of each other, requiring a lot of manual work to make it look correct.
I don't think it works like that at all. I mean RTX GI is just another tool at lighting artist's disposal. It's up to skill and talent to use that tool creatively. GI is accurate, doesn't mean it's automatic and effortless solution.
No.
I think the issue is that tricks can look good enough for a lot of people. My primary issue is that a lot of effort has been expended on getting those tricks to work as well as they do.
If Sony and Microsoft don't find a way to include Ray tracing on the next gen consoles, then it's safe to say that there will be a wide gap in graphics between PC and consoles.
Tricks don't even remotely look close to the real deal for 90% ore more of the time, that's the fact that can't be ignored.
That is, if developer deem it worth their time to expend extra resources to get a raytraced to work in their game.
It's really impressive how some scenes just straight up look bad/wrong, when the whole game would look great if I wasn't comparing it to any other version.
I think many developers don't have any experience with raytracing yet (unless they came from CG industry background beforehand) so they were just overly optimistic and excited about RTX. CG industry has been using raytracing for decades and there are plethora of tricks, hacks and tweaks needed to achieve reasonable render times. This is for pre-rendered stuff. In games all these tweaks will be even more prevalent because you have to do real time raytracing. This is why they had to use many tricks to get raytraced reflections going in BF5 and these reflections are still so very noisy, far from what I would consider acceptable
I've worked as a technical artist, not in anything resembling Triple-A, but still - doing these tricks takes a lot of effort and frustration, and many times you just can't reach the result you're looking for.
RTX v2 or v3 will be amazing when it becomes mainstream and hardware can handle it easily. But until then, this transition period will be painful and full of ups and downs. Raytracing in games might not even take off unless console manufacturers adopt it in some capacity. Most developers will never bother with 2 versions of their games just for PC, they already have their hands full with all the different platforms.
This is why TLoU 2 comparisons are lost on me. Looks like UC 4.5 and game isn't out yet and people are using a choreographed demo as an argument against Exodus.
This is true, but one of the reasons ray tracing is even possible in these small instances is because of things like material shaders, they're good in traditional lighting engines but they really take off with RTX.
With full realtime GI it is actually how it works though. For now, artists need to use multiple light sources (some of which might have nothing to do with real lights), ambient light hacks etc. to get a "realistic" look. Once realtime GI is the standard that's not necessary (at least for anything which goes for a photorealistic style).
Why does it need to be mainstream or easy on hardware to be amazing?
It's even worse for CGI in films, they use path tracing! Even lazier!
I can't find a 1080/4k comparison, but here's a 1080 Ti at 4k with everything maxxed video. He gets anywhere from high 30's to low 50's in gameplay. Considering it's maxxed out at extreme, I would say high with tesselation+hairworks+physx at 4k at a 30fps lock should definitely be doable on a 1080.
Except we are discussing lightning model here, which is affected by dynamic time of day and weather, not by facial animations.
Yes, I agree that hypothetical scenario that in no way relates to the reality of today or the near future would be bad.
