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Digital Foundry: Ray Tracing in Games: How Today's Big Tech Gamble Became Tomorrow's Sure Thing [Sponsored]
- Thread starter chandoog
- Start date
That looks very impressive. Try turning down volumetric lighting to medium and MSAA off, maybe you can hit 60 FPS more often for a very small visual impact. Since you have RTX for everything on, you can also disable Global Reflections and SSAO.These are my screenshots from my PC RTX 2080 Max Q 90W! RT makes a BIG Difference. This Is MAX Everything at 1080p With RT ON. I get 40 to 50 FPS and I dont mind at all.
Give me one example of a game with less environmental interactivity because the lighting is done using rasterisation.
What u are saying does not even make sence.
Also not all raster lighting is baked.
Skyrim has some of the most interactivity and that game is nearly a dacade old where the lighting is not even physically based.
The whole point of ray tracing is that any game can have lighting that good without artists spending hundreds of man hours faking it. Someone should look at Minecraft with ray tracing and have the lightbulb go off in their head just how much of a game changer it is. It can make Minecraft look like that.
Utterly ridiculous. I'm not coming into his home and interrupting dinner. He's producing a product, and in this case, defending one which is explicitly receiving funding from the industry he has 'passion' for (again, 'passion' for the industry you're covering is not inherently a good thing - it explains why you do it, but it's not a shield for any criticism). This was put out there for public consumption, it's going to be critiqued.
It's embarrassing that you think ray tracing is just "better lighting" and that you're being this defensive about being called out on it.
I agree that lighting can have a massive impact. But what else is it if not better lighting?
Is the simple geometry in Minecraft relevant? Is that why they can turn up the effects so much and maintain performance? Or is it just that dramatic because it looks terrible to begin with...
Is the simple geometry in Minecraft relevant? Is that why they can turn up the effects so much and maintain performance? Or is it just that dramatic because it looks terrible to begin with...
You can't "master lighting with rasterization" due to the nature of rasterization where all lighting is always a fake of some sort. A faked lighting means that it can't be dynamic and/or will break often requiring artists to go into the assets and remake them to fix the technological limitations - if they even can be fixed which they more often than not can't.
Most of games which you've mentioned are actually using some (highly limited due to lack of performance) form of ray tracing to calculate light transport in a scene so it's already a stretch to say that they have "mastered lighting with rasterization" because actually they didn't, they've added some form of RT into rasterization to get where they are with lighting.
RT makes a huge difference once you remove all the limitation current tech impose on the artists. Adding RT to a game which is made to look "fine" without RT is one thing, making a game where RT exist as a baseline feature is a wholly other level.
Nothing will "lessen the performance blows" of RT just as nothing has managed to lessen the blows which rasterization h/w brought to CPU rendered games back in the 90s. RT as general problem has no limit on performance which it can spend on tracing rays.
Every genre will benefit from RT. I fully expect that even 2D/2.5D side scrollers will benefit from RT at some point.
Minecraft is pretty unique case, that game can work on 7th gen platforms, heck it could probably work on a OG Xbox.
The leap in minecraft is so big because the game was never made with a realistic artstyle in the first place.
The same with quake 2, that game is like 25yrs old, so it's RT implementation is going to be very dramatic.
I agree it is impressive though.
But I'm talking about the level of overall visual improvement RT brings in games like control and Battlefield 5.
Lol don't lie.
I'm more excited for the improved physics, sound and AI when it comes to RT than the visual side tbh. I find a lot of the visual comparisons extremely underwhelming for the performance cost associated with it.
Isn't that Control face comparison just self shadowing?
Good video, Alex.
Isn't that Control face comparison just self shadowing?
Good video, Alex.
RT goes beyond just Global Illumination, which yes has been great for years....I was one of the guys who was really banking on CryEngine being the next big thing....I actually bothered learning a whole bunch of it and was very impressed with its lighting solution.
Pretty much any genre will benefit from RT, I think looking at Minecraft it transforms that game completely.
Imagine RDR2 with RT....its something which without actual side by sides might be hard to understand...rather quantify, but if RDR2 ever gets an RT update surely we will be blown away.
Hell look back at The Last of Us 2 gameplay trailer and imagine it with a good RT implementation better lighting, physics and reflections alone would make the store(?) fight scene so much more atmospheric.
If Ampere is as strong as they say it is.
I want this not just in the Omniverse but with actual gameplay.
Thank you a bunch, I'm can speak enough German. Wolfenstein < see
Your assumption is that developers will continue to dedicate hundreds or thousands of man hours to faking lighting if ray tracing is a viable option. If the next gen consoles have the RT performance I imagine that the time spent faking rasterized lighting will plummet. Ray tracing will be such a time and money saver for developers that anyone arguing against it's merits is just pissing into the wind.
How are next-gen consoles going to have decent RT performance :S I really want to know and why it's so difficult for Nvidia with £1000+ cards.
The lighting in Star Citzen before they changed engines or toned it down was absolutely amazing.
No problem at all, and that should be enough :P
Actually lighting in Star Citizen was only upgraded over time and switch from CryEngine to Lumberyard did not even affect it.
Even the racing level? That's what I played ages ago - I bought the m50 (little red racing) ship because of it. It looked unreal, but the performance was trash. Then it looked like every other game.
I never really tried the station section.
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The thing is though,increased polycount, current expensive effects like svogi and other new techs will also help complete the next gen visual pie. It won't just be one tech which is the game changer.
Out of curiosity, would having a system level feature to disable ray tracing in consoles be an impediment to the development of the technology? Simlpy because the option exists, developers would have to support non ray traced visuals? Just asking because I feel like the average person that's wowed by graphics isn't paying attention to the accuracy of lighting, reflections, shadows, etc. so it would nice for them to have an option to gain performance/resolution. I was skeptical of RTX at first but after playing Metro and Control, I feel the peformance hit is worth the enhancements to the visuals (left it off in Tomb Raider though). I'm looking forward to checking out the implementation in Youngblood.
In the long run ray tracing is a replacement for artists spending hundreds or thousands of man hours making fake lighting. In a world where ray tracing just works artists won't perform this labor, and there will be no fake lighting to fall back on.
that's like asking for a system level function to disable the game's lighting. it's pretty nonsense. if a dev doesn't want to use raytracing, they just wont use it. and that's what's gonna happen if they prioritize framerate. the point of consoles is players don't really get those kinds functions
I dont think they touched racing level for at least 2-3 years now ;p Its almost forgotten feature, as most people are racing in Persistent Universe on planets and moons.
Yeah...it was a very long time ago that I tried it... Nice to know you can race on planets now, might be time to try it out again. I thought you could only go on the station.
But I remember, it looked absolutely glorious...then I came back to it and it was a lot less impressive :S I couldn't put my finger on it. Maybe it was something else other than the engine change.
Youngblood is only reflections I think so the performance hit isn't bad at all, especially given that the game has a lot of headroom on high end cards to begin with. The reflections looks fantastic but in a way they're almost "too good" at times because some of the surfaces look like straight up polished mirrors.
I'm extremely impressed with the GI in Exodus and the performance is fine when you think about what it's actually doing. Two Colonels was another step up with the emissive lights and the stuff with the flamethrower. Personally can't wait to see what the RTX implementation looks like in the next expansion coming out on Tuesday. Tomb Raider and BF2 are the two main ones where the performance hit isn't worth it.
Unless they suddenly....and i mean pretty damn suddenly make the Min Spec an RTX 2060/NaviRT1 we are gonna still have none RT solutions for a while.
Remember even if consoles have an RT solution, if you are planning a PC release there are more people without an RT solution than they are people with one.
Chances are a clever and relatively cheap GI solution will be used mid to late gen.....then maybe at the start of nextgen we will start seeing games with RTX 2060 min spec.
I mean Shadow of the tomb raider has a min spec of a GTX 650....its like an 8 year old card
Metro Exodus a GTX 670
Read Dead Redemption 2 which you could argue is a true graphical showcase....is a GTX 970 min spec.....still a 6 year old card.
When the RTX 2060 is atleast 8 years old do I believe devs will start saying our min spec is something thats RT capable, we will be in rasterization land for a little while.
Even if it were true that 'devs have mastered rasterized lighting', what that ignores all the monumental work artists and developers have to do in order to achieve the current level. Just watch the DF video on Red Dead Redemption and gawk at how many separate graphics techniques are required to get that look. It's a ton of work.
Of course, we're a long way before any game can ship with just RT lighting so this work isn't going away soon. But the point of having so many of these programming techniques and baked lighting is to try and get as close to what ray tracing offers by itself.
Maybe you could get a game like Minecraft look somewhat close to RTX minecraft in certain scenes with traditional rasterized lighting. The question is how much time and the size of a development team you would need to achieve that. What RTX can ultimately provide is the lighting + shadowing techniques that only AAA studios can truly master now with a large team of artists to smaller developers. I repeat though - ultimately. We're a long way off.
Of course, we're a long way before any game can ship with just RT lighting so this work isn't going away soon. But the point of having so many of these programming techniques and baked lighting is to try and get as close to what ray tracing offers by itself.
Maybe you could get a game like Minecraft look somewhat close to RTX minecraft in certain scenes with traditional rasterized lighting. The question is how much time and the size of a development team you would need to achieve that. What RTX can ultimately provide is the lighting + shadowing techniques that only AAA studios can truly master now with a large team of artists to smaller developers. I repeat though - ultimately. We're a long way off.
I did not say that RTX was just about the reflections. Just that I find the layer of sheen & shine more distracting than I find the fake lighting solutions of current tech.
Ray tracing is the holy grail for lighting. To deny its benefits both in terms of visual fidelity and the amount of time it can cut down for developers who don't have to author separate light and shadow maps, is simply asinine.
The only concern is performance cost and as the video shows, gargantuan progress has been made in the hybrid systems already in less than 2 years. And the potential is undeniably even larger when paired with reconstruction techniques and ARS/VRS in console oriented and optimized games.
Dictator Hey, if you read this I wanted to tell you that that was a fantastisch video.
It has been a long time since your GAF days where your (on occasion, abrasive) posts about Crysis (CryEngine) being (and I am paraphrasing here) best thing since sliced bread, at times annoyed the fuck out of me. You were PC gamer through and through, heh. Now, as I have grown older as well as more interested in general graphical technology and seen you grow and get into a mainstream tech sector that specializes in graphics as well hone your oration skills and temperament while communicating with folks on Era, I have to tip my proverbial hat to you.
May you continue on flat trajectory at worst and upward one at best. Cheers und tschüss.
The only concern is performance cost and as the video shows, gargantuan progress has been made in the hybrid systems already in less than 2 years. And the potential is undeniably even larger when paired with reconstruction techniques and ARS/VRS in console oriented and optimized games.
---x---
Dictator Hey, if you read this I wanted to tell you that that was a fantastisch video.
It has been a long time since your GAF days where your (on occasion, abrasive) posts about Crysis (CryEngine) being (and I am paraphrasing here) best thing since sliced bread, at times annoyed the fuck out of me. You were PC gamer through and through, heh. Now, as I have grown older as well as more interested in general graphical technology and seen you grow and get into a mainstream tech sector that specializes in graphics as well hone your oration skills and temperament while communicating with folks on Era, I have to tip my proverbial hat to you.
May you continue on flat trajectory at worst and upward one at best. Cheers und tschüss.
That has nothing to do with RTX, you can have ray traced lighting in scenes with zero reflective or shiny objects and still see a big difference.
I feel the same way about glass surfaces in Control. The Janitor in that office has to be working overtime because the glass panels were immaculate.
Well that video disproves your point because all modern games don't use only baked lighting.
So RT is not needed for more environmental interactivity.
All modern games don't use baked lighting? Where are you getting that information from?
Did you even watch the video where he shows how the baked lighting breaks in Ghost Recon Wildlands? It's only 40 seconds into the video.
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While they have become good at 'emulating' how light works in games, there is no substitute for simulation. And emulation has time and resource related costs which scale with expected scope and fidelity of a game as opposed to simulation where the cost is performance (the magnitude of it that is being reduced with time and iteration).
The transformative quality RT has and will bring in a real time environment would essentially be like enjoying in-engine real time cutscenes of current gen games like Gears 5 or Uncharted 4 etc, where each scene is carefully authored by hand (additional lighting, higher fidelity self shadowing, sub surface scattering).
I would like to hear how RT is changing their workflow, especially, on the how much work is saved by not doing "fake lighting".
I've been trying to clean my office/flat and you guys keep giving me reasons to drop everything and write up my list of grievances about current lighting and reflection issues and how ray tracing can't become mainstream soon enough to magically solve everything.
I'm quite serious. Making water reflective and refractive, anything to do with mirrors, and large scale shadow mapping and lightmap usage seems to make a nearly endless list of problems. RT lighting is going to be grand.
Are some of you guys going to go around pointing out the differences with a magnifine glass if regular folks don't see the big deal? It needs to speak for itself. Hopefully it will this coming gen.
But there's a chance that games that fall back on faked lighting and push boundries in other ways, outshine games with RTX due to its performance costs at the moment. They could do a lot with that. There's also a chance that games without RTX look too outdated. I don't know which I would prefer.
But there's a chance that games that fall back on faked lighting and push boundries in other ways, outshine games with RTX due to its performance costs at the moment. They could do a lot with that. There's also a chance that games without RTX look too outdated. I don't know which I would prefer.
Except of course that previous improvements to graphics were so breathtaking and dramatic that the companies behind the tech did not need to pay someone to create a twenty minute video explaining why games look better. It was simply apparent to laymen at first glance.
"Just self shadowing" which doesn't really have a good general solution in a world of rasterization, yeah. Hence why you see the lack of shadows, shadow bleeds and stuff floating in the air above the point of shadow contact in pretty much EVERY. SINGLE. GAME. out there. People are so used to this shit that they don't even notice it anymore.
Similar to a "feature" which would just disable 2/3rds of a GPU. Would that be an impediment or not?
Generally I have found shadow map self shadowing on faces to be horrible, although some games use insane resources on shadow mapping faces in cutscenes - say FF15 on PC...
Would you kindly, at your earliest convenience, would write a list of issues you or folks you know in game development have faced pertaining to lighting and how and what parts of RT solution can address said grievances? It would be a fascinating read. Thank you.
Obviously not every light in a game is baked but just because it's not used for ALL lighting in a scene doesn't mean baked light maps aren't used in almost every game.
Try reading the dev post just below yours.
Thanks for taking the time to post.
RDR2 is decent, but the shadow solution, even maxed out on PC is TERRIBLE. The hard penumbra make the world look like a bad movie set. That in particular really bothered me.