I remember asking a dev here about this, and he said it may speed things up, but there is still an awful lot of work that will be done even when using RT.
The performance hit atm is still huge for something that isn't too noticable imo.
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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
I remember asking a dev here about this, and he said it may speed things up, but there is still an awful lot of work that will be done even when using RT.
The performance hit atm is still huge for something that isn't too noticable imo.
The thing is though devs will arrive at other barriers which will limit environmental interactivity.
Your premise that without RT devs can't make progress in environmental interactivity is just false.
nope, wrong.
great video!
really exemplifies how much accurate lighting can overcome geometry.
Doom 3 RTX needs to happen ASAP
...and Lol at the Uncharted 4 callouts as if it looked that good outside of cutscenes.
...and Lol at the Uncharted 4 callouts as if it looked that good outside of cutscenes.
Digital Foundry guys have been praising ray tracing even before this, just few days ago they released non-sposored tech hype video for RT in Young Blood. Praising RT and reconstruction tech helping it to perform well.
NV sponsored them to do more what the have been already doing.
Well, in the video, Alex talks about games like BF and Control utilizing hybrid systems, aka, tweaking incumbent rasterization solution where applicable and inserting RT based solution when the traditional method fails or more importantly produces far less accurate results. The only two games that are purely ray traced, or rather, 'Path traced' atm are Quake 2 and Minecraft.
The holy grail is essentially having current or next gen assets in terms of polygon, texture and animation detail and simply turn on path tracing for everything. That would essentially render every other lighting processes completely irrelevant.
Insofar as the performance is concerned, again, as evidenced in the video, significant strides in gaining back performance have made in less than 2 years and that is with only a minuscule install base of HW that actually support this feature. Simply imagine what strides this iterative tech will go through once next gen systems both supporting RT and set to sell tens if not hundreds of millions of units between them over the next 7 or so years, are released.
And again, just like the video says, reconstruction techniques have been maturing at a stunning pace which when allied to upcoming variable/adaptive rate shading would claw back even more performance to offset whatever is lost to RT.
Lastly, it is vital to remember that console games will general run at either 30 or 60fps (excluding VRR) which are set performance thresholds that presumably allows for a certain amount latitude for developers.
Oh year, right, I still remember how FP16 was supposed to give us all a free 2X boost in all games back in PS4Pro and Vega days. This was certainly not someone paying someone something somewhere because it already happened, right?
Or what was that thing before that, wait, that breathtaking and dramatic improvement to graphics we've had previously... Wait, wait... Was it bilinear filtering of texels with Voodoo Graphics in 1995?.. Can't remember really.
Truth is, the last time a new feature had such a huge uptake in the development world was with DX11's tessellation. And it went through all the same stages of grief, denial, huge performance losses and people claiming that they can't see anything being different. Now it's ubiquitous to the point where you can't even disable it sometimes, and the same will inevitably happen to ray tracing - but on a much larger scale since this tech is much more than what tessellation was/is.
Forgive my ignorance lol. I thought some AAA games already used self shadowing on main characters without RT...
lots of games do. even Luigi's Mansion 3 does (shit some 3DS games do). the difference is the resolution of the shadows and what casts shadows. RT allows for greater fidelity
They do, but for various reasons they don't always work perfectly or at all.
That's one of the many issues that RT solves.
If my eyes could roll any harder, they will fall off. Ray Tracing is and has always been the pinnacle of 3D rendering technology. It's something that Alex and the rest of the DF team have been excited about for a while now. This video being sponsored by Nvidia has nothing to do with their opinions about this. You can look up their past videos. It's evidence against whatever bullshit you are peddling.
RT would still make a really huge difference in those games and especially RDR2. The lighting is great but shadows are so inaccurate and lacking in many places compared to what RT would've offered. The game would look 10 times better with RT.
They do but the results you get in almost all of them are shown on the comparison above.
Basically the further away from main character a light is - the less chances there are that you'll get proper self-shadowing - or that you'll get it at all.
Which is why there's a crap load of additional artist work needed to make these characters look good in cut scenes - you basically need to place and move invisible light sources by hand for these self shadows to look good in cut scenes.
Not to mention the reflections. There's so many scenes, especially in the swamp, where their combination of cubemaps + SSR just completely falls apart. The seam where one technique starts and the other ends is so obvious and SSR just stops working near the edges of the screen. It's completely unstable in motion.
My vacuum cleaner's battery just died so I can answer this one quickly.
While I personally can't answer for the larger scale AAA stuff, the lighting solution we had for Turok2 (the 2017 remaster) was rife with problems. Notably, lightmapping was subject to some fairly annoying peter panning issues because there was only so much resolution we could put into a prebaked light texture, and the resolution itself came out fairly choppy without making the file size too big (we still couldn't/can't stream in textures at that scale) and without spending too much CPU time rendering them. It really wasn't ideal to be spending multiple hours rendering lights whenever we had to update a map.
Dynamic shadow maps were their own beast. They looked great but boy did they soak up GPU time, they also didn't interact with the lightmaps particularly well, creating a weird overlap, though that was a more solvable issue we just didn't have time to address in the end. We could only afford them in a few places and it created a few problems as they naturally soak through geometry, as typically you would combine all the shadow maps of geometry, but we couldn't afford to add shadow maps to everything.
We have since drastically improved the shadow mapping in a later iteration of Kex3 (for an unannounced project) and while we can finally afford to project shadow maps on all geometry and dynamic objects (though only a single one for everything, no layers), it still has weird halo issues (where shadowmaps aren't generated at the edges of objects) that requires all sorts of weird filtering to sort out, and it doesn't look great on everything because the shadow has the same penumbra regardless of how close or far any part of it from the light source and where it casts to, and isn't an especially is not an easy effect to construct.
I have no idea how, if you play modern 3D games on current gen systems, could come such a conclusion, I really don't. Depending on the lighting as well as the lack of Sub surface scattering during gameplay, the lighting can look really flat under the proper conditions which immediately fosters the sensation of, "...that does not look right".
Here are some examples for folks:
Uncharted 4-
When it looks right (lit by point source with self shadowing and sub surface scattering):
When current standard of rasterization fails to produce proper result in more ambient-ly lit conditions:
Quantum Break-
When it looks good:
When it does not:
Jedi Fallen Order-
When it looks good:
When it does not:
Thank you for taking the time to write this up as your vacuum cleaner is getting re-charged.
I had no idea that that is how dynamic shadows worked and always wondered how lighting would work in a pre-baked + dynamic shadow environment especially when the player utilizes point light sources like muzzle flash or grenade explosion etc.
From what I have been told RT can be broken down into parts and decoupled (such GI as a separate entity from RT reflections etc). To that end it sounds like you could forgo utilizing some measure of pre-baked and/or dynamic shadow solution in favour of RT. Given the video talks about "hybrid systems" it will be interesting how much of current rasterized solution can be offloaded to RT and whether RT can have an LoD system of its own down the line.
Again, I really appreciate the knowledge drop. Cheers.
I don't think it would be a huge deal for the devs to implement. It would be very hard for modders to add - until 2035 when we can emulate RDR2 and replace effects wholesale with raytraced features like how older games get new features today.
THX for the screenshots they are valid. they show the problems with old techniques doing lighting.I have no idea how, if you play modern 3D games on current gen systems, could come such a conclusion, I really don't. Depending on the lighting as well as the lack of Sub surface scattering during gameplay, the lighting can look really flat under the proper conditions which immediately fosters the sensation of, "...that does not look right".
Here are some examples for folks:
Uncharted 4-
When it looks right (lit by point source with self shadowing and sub surface scattering):
When current standard of rasterization fails to produce proper result in more ambient-ly lit conditions:
Quantum Break-
When it looks good:
When it does not:
Jedi Fallen Order-
When it looks good:
When it does not:
Thank you for taking the time to write this up as your vacuum cleaner is getting re-charged.
I had no idea that that is how dynamic shadows worked and always wondered how lighting would work in a pre-baked + dynamic shadow environment especially when the player utilizes point light sources like muzzle flash or grenade explosion etc.
From what I have been told RT can be broken down into parts and decoupled (such GI as a separate entity from RT reflections etc). To that end it sounds like you could forgo utilizing some measure of pre-baked and/or dynamic shadow solution in favour of RT. Given the video talks about "hybrid systems" it will be interesting how much of current rasterized solution can be offloaded to RT and whether RT can have an LoD system of its own down the line.
Again, I really appreciate the knowledge drop. Cheers.
completely fucking boggles my mind that people think ray tracing is some kind of meme or gimmick
fantastic video by df
fantastic video by df
I don't see the whole reason to complain about performance too much, especially on consoles. devs will be using upscaling techniques and variable rate shading to claw back to 30 and 60fps while using RT. sure they can get better performance without RT, but you can also get better performance by having no lighting or shadow casting or AO.
Yogi strikes me as the type of guy who would have had a pissy fit when the PSOne came out and didn't have graphics like Jurassic Park.
I never said the DF guys weren't sincere.
it's more that if the tech were more striking, there wouldn't need to be these lengthy videos where we zoom in on the shadow of a folding chair to see how RTX how great it is.
if the games using RTX looked as striking as prerendered CG (or If RTC wasn't as huge of a drag on performance) there would probably less pushback and a lot more enthusiasm.
is there some reason why people want to treat criticism of RTX as a general criticism of ray tracing?
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Disclosed sponsored content is fine. kliksphilip did a DLSS one the other day over The New Colossus, and LowspecGamer did one about Gamestream (along with a non-sponsored version). There is a lot of really good information to be gleaned from sponsored spots, even if the purpose is ultimately to sell you on something. No reason to aggressively call anyone out, as long as there is proper transparency, which is exactly what I'm seeing from DF here.
On the topic: I though Alex was *this* close to talking about SE's Back Stage demo when talking about a modern version of real time PT. Makes sense not to though, its not a game. All of the post-CEDEC interviews are done and there's a lot of really interesting reading material in the news section.
It's good to see 60fps is achievable at 1080p-ish resolutions. Anybody bellyaching should spend an afternoon going through Raytracey's Blog to see what its was like in the GTX 280/480/580 days. Some of the OTOY YT related content is now offline know, don't know what that's about. EDIT: A lot of OTOY's material is on Vimeo, that's good.
We've come a long way and things are just getting started. At GDC/GTC we're most likely going to get an enterprise preview of gen 2 RTX, with consumer cards coming in late summer/early fall.
On the topic: I though Alex was *this* close to talking about SE's Back Stage demo when talking about a modern version of real time PT. Makes sense not to though, its not a game. All of the post-CEDEC interviews are done and there's a lot of really interesting reading material in the news section.
It's good to see 60fps is achievable at 1080p-ish resolutions. Anybody bellyaching should spend an afternoon going through Raytracey's Blog to see what its was like in the GTX 280/480/580 days. Some of the OTOY YT related content is now offline know, don't know what that's about. EDIT: A lot of OTOY's material is on Vimeo, that's good.
We've come a long way and things are just getting started. At GDC/GTC we're most likely going to get an enterprise preview of gen 2 RTX, with consumer cards coming in late summer/early fall.
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I don't think so. 1080p/60 with upscaling and VRS at $300 (and will only get cheaper as new cards come out) is a fine minimum benchmark. yea, going higher res will be a bigger cost penalty, but cards get cheaper over time. especially when competition finally decides to release something
Dictator , this video is flippin' awesome. Thank you so much for doing this. I always love your fantastic examples of the improvements RT makes, but it is amazing seeing how far it's come in such a short time. I remember when Nvidia first started promoting the RTX cards and seeing how hard it hit performance at the time, and thinking yeah, it's not quite ready. But man, that is a massive improvement in Battlefield just from some patches and driver updates, and then Control is a whole new level.
My 1080 Ti funked out a bit ago and EVGA sent me a 2080 as a replacement (and then another, because the first one was broken, and then a 2080 Super, because the second one was broken too...) and now having had a chance to experience RT myself, and seeing how much it's improving, I'm now super excited to see what happens next! Can't wait to try some Minecraft RTX!
My 1080 Ti funked out a bit ago and EVGA sent me a 2080 as a replacement (and then another, because the first one was broken, and then a 2080 Super, because the second one was broken too...) and now having had a chance to experience RT myself, and seeing how much it's improving, I'm now super excited to see what happens next! Can't wait to try some Minecraft RTX!
We are seeing current gen games with RT, imagine the new hellblade trailer with RT
it wouldn't shock me if it did use RT. if it was running on XSX hardware, it might be the first tease of AMD's RT capabilities.
You could try watching the video, which shows you the exact footage the comparison is pulled from, in motion.
[OT: not necessarily directed to the above poster]
JfC you people are so embarrassing.
I never said it was the only thing preventing it, but it's a certainly a big reason. Watch any video about baked light maps in games, the major limitation is that it prevents items being moved from their location. I've worked with Unreal a fair bit, once you move something in your scene all the lighting has to be rebaked. You can't be moving or destroying objects in the scene if light maps have been baked for those objects. I'm not making anything up.
Here's a good presentation about game lighting if you want to educate yourself on the subject. I've timestamped it at a relevant location:
The same reason they twist their brains until 30fps is good enough. Because the console makers haven't handed it to them yet.
When only PC gamers have it, it's the same song and dance as always: "Meh."
RT will be a revolution when Microsoft and Sony say it is.
Jesus fucking Christ.
The only reason some people think 30fps is fine is because they're console fucking plebs that are fucking brainwashed by Sony and Microsoft?
This, 100%
Its only going to take one first party studio implement one of the current techniques and implementation and everybody will change their tune towards ray tracing.
Part of what makes me anxious is that the simultaneous push towards raytracing and 4K will mean the new consoles are hamstrung in terms of performance and visuals (particularly if most or all games are expected to be playable at 4K and have raytracing). As long as there are options to turn that stuff for better framerates I am mostly cool with inclusion of these as optional features. Though even then there's the issue that games will have leave a lot of overhead for when those features are enabled.
Current videocards are already straining with 4K and raytracing both enabled, but it's a good bet that the PS5/XSX won't have 2080-class GPUs......so whatever GPUs they do have will be buckling even harder under the strain of 4K and RTX.
Most companies won't bother with 4K. Maybe indies and mid-budget titles but everything else will use some form of upscaling. Most people can't tell the difference at distance anyway
Keep seeing people calling Ray Tracing RTX, RTX is the name of Nvidia's RT and Tensor core tech. You won't be seeing RTX on the next gen consoles. Ray Tracing yes, but not Nvidia's RT card branding.
I know it's semantics but still.
I know it's semantics but still.
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