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Ray Tracing SHOULDN'T be Used for every game next gen
- Thread starter T002 Tyrant
- Start date
Not every game will have it. Maybe the big AAA Exclusives yeah but it's so expensive in the hardware use kind of way where not every dev is going to have the time to optimize it.
As others have mentioned, ray tracing the technology (input/data) should not be confused with the output or the style of the games it is currently mostly being used for. It's just producing sets of data that were previously too expensive to gather in real-time to produce effects such as accurate reflections, indirect lighting, or shadows. That doesn't mean that the data couldn't be used for stylized effects, art style or just completely different in other games.
Secondly it's still not being used for the entire lighting pipeline of a modern game, so in most cases you could still easily fake the effects you mention in the original post and using ray tracing doesn't mean even close to always producing similar visual style across different games. There's incredible amount of artistry behind creating game visuals no matter what, and all ray-tracing does is give those artists more tools to produce their vision without certain limitations or spending vast amounts of the development budget on going around those limitations (and while those work-arounds are a part of the craft, removing them naturally allows people to work on other beneficial things, and crazy amounts of per scene manual setup to achieve certain effects isn't necessarily super motivating when that time could instead be used more productively).
Secondly it's still not being used for the entire lighting pipeline of a modern game, so in most cases you could still easily fake the effects you mention in the original post and using ray tracing doesn't mean even close to always producing similar visual style across different games. There's incredible amount of artistry behind creating game visuals no matter what, and all ray-tracing does is give those artists more tools to produce their vision without certain limitations or spending vast amounts of the development budget on going around those limitations (and while those work-arounds are a part of the craft, removing them naturally allows people to work on other beneficial things, and crazy amounts of per scene manual setup to achieve certain effects isn't necessarily super motivating when that time could instead be used more productively).
So they'll use baked lighting when it's more appropriate just like now. What's the problem??
There's no mandate that every game use real time/dynamic lighting now, so why would that suddenly be the case next gen?
There's no mandate that every game use real time/dynamic lighting now, so why would that suddenly be the case next gen?
It should always be used for certain parts of the scene. There's no negatives to always having proper ray-traced reflections and shadows as both will make artists' and programmers' lives easier not having to come up with hacky ways around the limitations of inferior methods.
Not saying we'll get there in the beginning of next gen but it's the clear end point.
Not saying we'll get there in the beginning of next gen but it's the clear end point.
It won't. I suspect next gen hardware implementation to be very weak anyway. AMD is behind in Ray Tracing as is and it already severely affects performance on PC on high end cards.
mid we see it at all, expectit to be minimal.
mid we see it at all, expectit to be minimal.
JFC seriously, it's crazy how people invent ways to be concerned about these sorts of things.
