-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
Polyphony Digital are Working on Realtime Ray tracing
- Thread starter McFly
- Start date
And wiped out all their profits from the previous two generations. Never again. We no longer live in Kutaragi times.
That said, some kind of raytracing in next gen consoles is not beyond the realm of possibility. And not sure why PD would be working on realtime raytracing if it isn't going to be utilised?
Of course AMD is working on RT.... It has been for a good while now
GT Sport running on a 4K tv is just incredible right now, have no idea how its going to look with RT on ps5..
what exactly is the hubbub about "real time ray-tracing"? clearly this is some sort of new powerful rendering tech but it's very confusing to me because when I think "ray-tracing" I think Doom from 1993 so if someone could fill a low-techie like me in that'd be rad
Battlefield V shows it off best, but I think it's mostly being able to do much better reflections of real time effects.
Compare the windows, walls and puddle here to see how much more light and reflection Raytracing does.
OG Doom ran on a ray caster engine that, on the simplest terms, took a 2D map layout and "projected" it into something that looks like a full 3D space, while still being actually 2D. That's why games like Doom or Duke 3D are referred to as 2.5D games.
Ray tracing, however, is a rendering method for simulating how light works by actually "shooting" virtual photons into a scene and let them bounce around geometry. This way you can achieve stuff like actual accurate reflections in BFV because that's actually rendering bounced photons from the objects or buildings being reflected. It's a very very demanding technique and can't still be fully implemented to recreate all of lighting in games without making them actual slideshows.
Real time raytracing in most games works like this: for each pixel of the screen, trace out 1 or more rays (or less, really), when that ray hits a surface, traits of the surface are calculated (is it rough? is it smooth?) and then a ray is traced from the point of the surface appropriate to the angle and material properties (with a degree of randomness for anything other than super sharp shadows / reflections / what have you), and that ray is then extended until it hits at least 1 other object (including the 'sky', and in the case of BFV RTX it is bounced one more time from an additional surface). Based on the 'hits' a color of the initial pixel on screen can be more or less correctly calculated.
This is demanding because you must calculate lots of info for objects not even on the screen.
The more rays per pixel you shoot the more correct the information becomes. In real life each mote of space you see probably has thousands of photons working upon it.
PS4, X1, PC games, and even some Switch games do 'screen space' reflections where they do not gather any information about objects off the screen but instead try to correctly represent reflections based on pixels that are already rendered to the screen.
Ray Tracing is as old as the hills, even the Amiga could do it to some degree. Nvidia's new cards just have some dedicated special sauce to help with the math don't they? I mean you could RT with consoles today couldn't you but the complexity of the graphics to light would need to be fairly simple or have pathetic framerates etc.
Ray tracing in racing games is going to look absolutely insane. You can already see some really promising stuff in that video around the 8 minute mark, despite the heavy noise and how it takes many frames to get enough samples for a clear reflection.
To the people that keep mentioning BFV: I own BFV and an RTX card, I've played with RTX. BF V is absolutely not a great example of what ray tracing can do for a game. The art of the game doesn't exactly accentuate RTX, as it has such few glossy surfaces that it's even hard to find reflective surfaces sometimes. In a racing game this is pretty much the complete opposite.
To the people that keep mentioning BFV: I own BFV and an RTX card, I've played with RTX. BF V is absolutely not a great example of what ray tracing can do for a game. The art of the game doesn't exactly accentuate RTX, as it has such few glossy surfaces that it's even hard to find reflective surfaces sometimes. In a racing game this is pretty much the complete opposite.
Battlefield V shows it off best, but I think it's mostly being able to do much better reflections of real time effects.
Compare the windows, walls and puddle here to see how much more light and reflection Raytracing does.
Technically that is now out of date, as this early version of RTX relied exclusively on raytracing (and since some objects are culled from calculations at distance they are removed from reflections that screen space reflections would have).
Better to show reflections of off-screen elements.
The ray tracing used in movie CGI is orders of magnitude more complex than what even whatever the most powerful Nvidia card right now could even dream of handling in real time. The current real time techniques use relatively low ray counts and still need some order of interpolation and clean-up to achieve something that looks acceptable for a game that needs to run at at least 30fps.
edit: lol, I must've had a brain fart or something, my reply to your post has nearly nothing to do with what you asked lol
So yes, technically any computing device can produce raytraced images of some kind. I remember messing around with a real time ray tracing tech demo on my old Pentium 3 but it was a very simple scene.
It's amazing the progress we've had since then and it's only going to get better.
Last edited:
Probably unrealistic to see this being a core feature of a PS5 Gran Turismo game. That being said, the demo, especially with the P1 in the garage does look fantastic.
I'd be really stoked to see some indies (Bound creators Plastik and Matt Nava co-founded Giant Squid come to mind) get their hands on this stuff come next-gen though, with games that aren't as busy replicating reality.
I'd be really stoked to see some indies (Bound creators Plastik and Matt Nava co-founded Giant Squid come to mind) get their hands on this stuff come next-gen though, with games that aren't as busy replicating reality.
Who's talking about film RT? I'm just saying you can RT with basically any cpu. It's just math. So theoretically you can have RT today on the PS4, just super low poly. I know it won't happen, but I'm saying theoretically it can be done. Nvidia's RTX cards have some dedicated silicon that helps ease the load/math but that doesn't mean a bog standard CPU or GPU can't perform RT. It just wouldn't be very good. What sort of TF are we talking to negate the need for what's in RTX, y'know for a sort of brute force solution with acceptable results?
Having near-lifelike light refraction effects and real-time reflections on hyper-detailed car models under the watch of Polyphony Digital would legit wreck the uncanny valley beyond belief. Pair their level of hyper-realistic detail with a smooth 60fps framerate on a 4k/8k screen....fuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Nvidia claimed RTX allowed for ~1/8th the raw CUDA power which would be necessary. (I believe they only claimed this indirectly)
Seems like you messed up the quote and it's attributing amc's quote to me, lol.
I highly doubt this will be in a commercial game product from them, at most it will be used in a photo mode feature where modern techniques can help make the renders significantly faster than old school CPU based ray tracing.
I'm a firm believer that advancements in real-time ray tracing will be a huge part of games and how games are made going forward the technology matures, but AMD has given no indication that they will be able to ship hardware for the next generation of consoles that will provide hardware acceleration to allow for the type of ray tracing we see with the new RTX cards. I own a 2080 Ti and the compute power of that card is really something else, but it also currently costs more than double the target MSRP of a next gen console that is expected to launch within the next two years.
I'm a firm believer that advancements in real-time ray tracing will be a huge part of games and how games are made going forward the technology matures, but AMD has given no indication that they will be able to ship hardware for the next generation of consoles that will provide hardware acceleration to allow for the type of ray tracing we see with the new RTX cards. I own a 2080 Ti and the compute power of that card is really something else, but it also currently costs more than double the target MSRP of a next gen console that is expected to launch within the next two years.
in laymans terms, think of it this way:
Scenario:
You're in a dark bathroom and you have a flashlight. the bulb of that flashlight is a source of light that shoots a beam - or a "ray" - of light. That ray of light bounces off of surfaces and reflects back light to you and provides you with information of the object it hit, like its texture or its color, etc. For example, you shine the flashlight on a closed toilet seat and can see that it's white and it's semi glossy, or you shine it on a towel and you can see that the towel has this cloth texture to it etc.
"Real-time ray tracing" is basically positional, color, texture, and other info of an object produced when a generated ray of light bounces off an object. A generated ray of light can bounce off multiple objects as well and provide collective info of all the objects that ray of light touched as well.
Back in that bathroom scenario, you shine the light at the mirror and that same ray of light bounces off the mirror onto the towel. That same ray of light now shows you the texture/size of the mirror AND the texture/color/etc of the towel in its path because it's bouncing off both objects and returning back to you. The information of all the objects that the ray of light bounced off of is being added to that ray and returned.
To compare to current lighting effects, some games actually use ray tracing to a certain degree - although not as advanced as it is now due to the sheer amount of computational power that's required - however most games use baked lighting and global lighting effects to light up their games.
To define this, let's go back in the bathroom:
A baked lighting effect would be painting the tiled floor and the toilet to make it look like it's casting a shadow or has a shadow cast on it from the sink and/or the shower.
A global effect would be turning on the bathroom light. Everything in the room gets lit up at the same time, all textures get shown and revealed at the same time. You now have to use furniture or other objects to make certain parts of the room dark.
Hopefully this helps makes some sense of it.
John and Alex from DF must be like:
Let's hope something comes out of PD's experiments. I'm curious if hardware will has to become better first or if optimizations and a bit of trickery can make real time ray-tracing less taxing next gen.
Let's hope something comes out of PD's experiments. I'm curious if hardware will has to become better first or if optimizations and a bit of trickery can make real time ray-tracing less taxing next gen.
What other tech have they showcased/demoed that didn't make it into one of their games?
Didn't they over spec the sport models when making them which would mean they are already to go on a ps5 version. Would make sense why sport gets updated so often. Maybe they will launch Gran Turismo 7 for the PS5 launch or year 1 which will be everything in Sport with maybe 20% more content added in. They then can go back to adding monthly updates to 7 which would satisfy everybody.
Yep. Honestly we should just stop comparing consoles to PC. They serve each of their playerbases well.
Nobody will be able to get you truly exact figures, but Taty Aalto of Remdy Entertainment has a talk here on their integration of real time ray tracing into the Northlight engine. For ambient occlusion, a Titan V (which lacks RT cores, but was supposedly still a good card for Ray Tracing since Nvidia was proudly advertising it's RT capabilities last year) took 5 miliseconds to render the Ray Traced component, while on a Turing card it took 1 millisecond or less. "It's roughly five times faster to shoot rays on that hardware" @ 12minutes 28 seconds.
For shadows, on Titan V it took ~4ms, vs ~1ms on Turing. So about 4x faster in that scenario.
The point is why would you use hardware designed for other tasks in order to do something inefficiently.
The consoles even have custom silicon to process decoding certain image formats etc, in order to not need to get the GPU or CPU to do it slowly
That's exactly why we have GPUs, you could do all your graphics stuff on a CPU, but it's really inefficient.
Specialised hardware for ray tracing and machine learning is the future of computers
Wouldn't expect it, but I can see a universe where Polyphony releases a GT7 Prologue or something in that vein. They've actually been cranking out GT Sport content at a solid rate now, so maybe they put some of that in their back pocket so they can make it for the PS5 launch.
Between this and the 8K/120fps demo, Polyphony seems to have a pleasing amount of future proofing in mind. Which is fantastic, since it'll hopefully prevent the ol' "GT5 cars still look like they're from the PS2" problem.
I wish. Sport barely even has over 200 cars and virtually no old school economy tuners. I would gladly take up-ressed GT2 models.
I wonder if they are doing something like this. https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...anan/f6ad3b82e4bd690cd287fb4febec1d3519dffb2c
It would be a big change from their current method of tesselating the shit out of everything, but might give better results considering their love of smoothly curved surfaces.
Wish there was direct footage of this!
It would be a big change from their current method of tesselating the shit out of everything, but might give better results considering their love of smoothly curved surfaces.
Wish there was direct footage of this!
Don't talk nonsense, there's 271 cars in GTS at last count since latest December update as they added 103 cars so far on top of the launch count. Also added in 32 tracks inc 7 new locations throughout all the updates.
Cool. Last I saw they were at around 230. I still don't like their car selection though :/
.
I'd prefer this just for the model years featured tbh.
Er....you're telling me something I already know and what I'm basically saying in the posted quote. I know dedicated silicon is the answer for many, many tasks in computing, and what Nvidia has devised is obviously extremely beneficial to RT but my point was you can still create RT from what we have in today's consoles. It just wouldn't be up to snuff. Anyway ThereAreFourNaan posted a good link for my query at the end of the post about possible brute force numbers. Cheers.
Last edited: