Of course, but that's what the example was being used to show off.
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Can I be honest here, I tried out Ray Tracing and it's not a big deal as some people make it out to be.
- Thread starter Derktron
- Start date
Of course, but that's what the example was being used to show off.
No and no.
Raytracing is a h/w tool which you can use or not - similar to something like tessellation.
If you're aiming at using it you will have to budget your renderer accordingly because you will need more processing per frame to happen with it being in use.
There is nothing in the h/w itself which dictates any fps level or resolution - it's up to the developer to choose those which will provide the best all around experience.
And it's absolutely possible that some game may actually be better overall (higher fps or resolution or something else) without RT while another will make extensive use of it while still being able to output in 4K/60.
There are about six threads focused on Ray Tracing right now. People are ascribing way too much significance to a feature that is additive and very impactful on performance.
But you're right, the majority aren't describing it as the only qualifier of a good looking game.
This is a pointless qualifier.
A 2D game made for Amiga can be "a good looking game" in 2022.
RT is just an accurate representation of how lightning works and allows developers to simulate it even in complete dynamic scenarios.
3d work in general have always struggled with lighting and being able to have accurate lighting in real-time and no long bake times can severely impact content production allowing developers to iterate faster, not to mention that it's one less hurdle preventing the games to be more dynamic.
So, not to sound too harsh, but how you blown you are by the current usages is irrelevant.
Though, if you are willing to see the impacts, Alex from DF video on WD Legions is a good start. The beginning of the video where he shows the first WD and all the tech they had to implement to fake reflections and still got shat by it, makes a good case on why it would be awesome if they just enable RT reflections on everything and it would just work. Now make the same considerations for lighting (it's a open world game with dynamic life cycles overall), shadows etc...
Though we have Hellblade 2 which was even more impressive and was using hardware RT according to that Epic blog post.
3d work in general have always struggled with lighting and being able to have accurate lighting in real-time and no long bake times can severely impact content production allowing developers to iterate faster, not to mention that it's one less hurdle preventing the games to be more dynamic.
So, not to sound too harsh, but how you blown you are by the current usages is irrelevant.
Though, if you are willing to see the impacts, Alex from DF video on WD Legions is a good start. The beginning of the video where he shows the first WD and all the tech they had to implement to fake reflections and still got shat by it, makes a good case on why it would be awesome if they just enable RT reflections on everything and it would just work. Now make the same considerations for lighting (it's a open world game with dynamic life cycles overall), shadows etc...
Unreal 5 demo definitely used raytracing, just not the exact RT that is being accelerated by hardware on current gpus.
Though we have Hellblade 2 which was even more impressive and was using hardware RT according to that Epic blog post.
Not to mention the games people would use as an example of good reflection without RT (like TLoU2) would be games that would have developers spend a ton of time on carefully creating and aligning the cube maps. That shit is time consuming and not easy, and it still breaks. It's resources that Devs can spend elsewhere were they not busy carefully baking and placing those things to perfection.
Maybe it is because I played through it again with my new 3080 build, but I was never wowed on my first play through as much as I was when maxing it out 2nd time round, but you are right, as soon as you settle into playing, you do forget about it, but then that is true for most graphics options I find. If you slow down and just observe your surroundings in Control, it is stunning.
Exactly. Games can look good without RT? They can.
But there's no free lunch, the games look good because developers spent hours calculating the expensive lighting offline so when you are playing the game it can look good under the restricted lighting conditions they had to limit it to.
Again the Alex/DF video on Halo Infinite is an awesome lecture on that, and they even show how an open world with dynamic light like metro can go to look as dull as HI did under the wrong light conditions, to something that matches the pre baked lighting of tlou2 by turning RT GI on.
Oh really, well go back into your 8-bit cave with these 'controversial opinions' and leave the reflections in the the puddles to us.
Yeah I get where you are coming from it's not game changing but visually it can look impressive.
Yeah I get where you are coming from it's not game changing but visually it can look impressive.
I don't understand why we need Ray tracing? Sometimes accurate sunlight is extremely unflattering
If the underlined is referring to the dev workflow improvements deriving from not having to spend time precomputing lighting, because it's all real-time, then this isn't actually true for the RT implementations for current games being produced at the moment.
All currently produced games use RT only for certain specific effects like reflections and dynamic shadows. Fully RT GI is out of reach for even the most powerfully PCs at the moment. Devs also have to target platforms incapable of any RT, so a traditional raster lighting mode still has to be authored and iterated, so in most cases, devs are now doing more work than prior to the introduction of RT, as they need to test and optimise game and assets for both.
That's one of the other reasons, people want more dynamic environments but having more dynamic environment with baked lighting just means it ends up looking off.
I think it's important for OP to say which games they played as well. It looks really good in some games and not great in others. Sometimes it is worth the cost and sometimes not. Pointless judging it based only on some select titles. For instance, it looks amazing in Miles Morales because of all the reflections and how complete it makes the buildings look visually imo.
I think is a nice effect but honestly is not something I feel I really need with nextgen games...
Better geometry, textures, even lighting are cool but honestly, the big productions this gen made some very satisfying visuals in this aspects.
Things i really wanted the devs spent time and processing power in future games that I think should be really the leap forward in game technology are:
1 animations in general ( facial, body, everything)
2 IA behavior ( human, animals, living creatures in general react and act in believable ways)
3 better fluid simulations and particles ( water, smoke, fire, wind, spells, destruction in general )
Better geometry, textures, even lighting are cool but honestly, the big productions this gen made some very satisfying visuals in this aspects.
Things i really wanted the devs spent time and processing power in future games that I think should be really the leap forward in game technology are:
1 animations in general ( facial, body, everything)
2 IA behavior ( human, animals, living creatures in general react and act in believable ways)
3 better fluid simulations and particles ( water, smoke, fire, wind, spells, destruction in general )
Would be handy if there was a thread with tons of posts describing the benefits with RT - most of them not even related to end result visual spectacle.
Like this thread.
One day ray tracing might be good for something besides tanking framerates
today is not that day
today is not that day
It's in early stages but 1/ has great potential and once the performance cost becomes negligible it will be the go-to technique for lots of stuff for sure, and 2/ I imagine it will greatly reduce dev cost because stuff that you previously had to bake in and re-do every time you needed to change something, you will now just do in real time. So it's actually a big deal, just hard to explain because the industry got so good at faking lots of the techniques, and the real deal is still eating too much into the performance budget.
How ray tracing was used in last-gen games was really minimal since the audience who had hardware capable of it was very small (and even in that audience, the lower end RTX cards weren't powerful enough to really show much ray tracing without killing the framerate). That's changing now that ray tracing cards are cheaper and far more powerful, and consoles are getting it.
I think this weekend's Digital Foundry review of Watchdogs Legion really shows how powerful having ray-traced reflections can be in a game that takes place entirely in a realistic city, especially the intro comparing it to the earlier games in the series. It adds a ton to the realism and believability of the environment and theme, and the game really goes to town with raytracing.
youtu.be
Ray traced shadows and lighting can add to the experience in big ways too, though it can take the right circumstance for it to stand out. Really, Ray Tracing isn't about "pretty graphics" but more immersion into the game, your brain has to do less work imagining the world in the game as real.
I think this weekend's Digital Foundry review of Watchdogs Legion really shows how powerful having ray-traced reflections can be in a game that takes place entirely in a realistic city, especially the intro comparing it to the earlier games in the series. It adds a ton to the realism and believability of the environment and theme, and the game really goes to town with raytracing.
Watch Dogs Legion PC Review: Ray Tracing + GFX Upgrades - A Taste of Next-Gen?
Join Alex Battaglia for the complete breakdown of Watch Dogs Legion on PC - how is it enhanced over the current-gen consoles? What does the ray tracing look ...
youtu.be
Ray traced shadows and lighting can add to the experience in big ways too, though it can take the right circumstance for it to stand out. Really, Ray Tracing isn't about "pretty graphics" but more immersion into the game, your brain has to do less work imagining the world in the game as real.
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Basically how I feel
I don't want it to be like 4k with the pro and one x. Tanking frame rate at the expense of pretty graphics.
Nah, the hunt for 30fps 4K is. Both are total wastes of resources though that certainly won't be spent on engaging level design or incredible animations or stories though.
Raytracing is more important than 4k imo.
Hopefully we get more 1080p 60fps RT options next gen.
Hopefully we get more 1080p 60fps RT options next gen.
Technologically, ray tracing is the actual holy grail of graphics technology right now. Like, it's the thing we were pretty sure would never be feasible in real-time, so we got really good at faking visual approximations of it over the decades. The latter being the reason why it doesn't seem all that great on the user's end right now.
It's still the future though.
It's still the future though.
Nanite does work with moving geometry. (move, rotate and most likely scaling.)
Transparency, animated/topology changing geometry apparently is not supported.
Storage usage is an interesting problem, hopefully we will have more information on it soon.
They could probably add some neat effects such as reflections, but TLOU2 (just like TLOU1) already has largely ray traced lighting.
I believe they already have ray tracing reflections, but only in controlled rooms with no interactive objects. But yeah they could have it on all windows outside which would be neat!
yeah, i am not really impressed tbh and i thought i was the only one heh. i'd much rather have devs use processing power for more realistic physics, a thousand times over... lighting is already great IMO while physics are stuck in 2004. i don't care how pretty reflections are on a window if i can't even break it.
What ever happened to PC gaming being about pushing technology to it's limits? I totally get wanting high frame rates depending on the game but there's also something fun with crushing your PC to get the best possible graphics. I still fondly remember trying to max out Crysis on an ATi X1900XT. Sure, ray tracing has a huge performance impact, but it can look stunning and I believe it's the future of real time rendering. People complain too much about demanding settings.
It has RT, in a basic rudimentary form of cone tracing and screen space tracing.
NV's Marbles at Night demo features a comparable level of geometric complexity while also using h/w RT for lighting.
Who's preventing them from doing this?
It seems many people don't understand how lighting in games works and that's fine since you're not all knowledgeable about game development (and I'm certainly not an expert but have some knowledge of it). Here is an example to maybe illustrate both why many people aren't seeing a huge difference now vs why it's actually a big deal. This is a digital painting:
and here is the original photograph:
And people will say "they look almost the same, I don't see much difference at all". Yes, because the painter is very very skilled at recreating real life but the big thing is the painting took hundreds of hours while the photo took a couple of hours, and the photo still looks better and more realistic.
So that's the first thing, development time. The other big thing is the painting is completely static, you can't repose the model without spending an equal amount of time making a new painting. With a photo you just have her move and snap another one.
That is basically what's happening with lighting in games. The vast majority of lighting is faked to emulate what RT gives you in real time without all the extra effort, effort that can be put into making other aspects of the game better and more visually appealing.
We won't see the benefits right away but if we want to see better and more dynamic worlds in the future raytracing is absolutely a big big deal.
and here is the original photograph:
And people will say "they look almost the same, I don't see much difference at all". Yes, because the painter is very very skilled at recreating real life but the big thing is the painting took hundreds of hours while the photo took a couple of hours, and the photo still looks better and more realistic.
So that's the first thing, development time. The other big thing is the painting is completely static, you can't repose the model without spending an equal amount of time making a new painting. With a photo you just have her move and snap another one.
That is basically what's happening with lighting in games. The vast majority of lighting is faked to emulate what RT gives you in real time without all the extra effort, effort that can be put into making other aspects of the game better and more visually appealing.
We won't see the benefits right away but if we want to see better and more dynamic worlds in the future raytracing is absolutely a big big deal.
It seems many people don't understand how lighting in games works and that's fine since you're not all knowledgeable about game development (and I'm certainly not an expert but have some knowledge of it). Here is an example to maybe illustrate both why many people aren't seeing a huge difference now vs why it's actually a big deal. This is a digital painting:
and here is the original photograph:
And people will say "they look almost the same, I don't see much difference at all". Yes, because the painter is very very skilled at recreating real life but the big thing is the painting took hundreds of hours while the photo took a couple of hours, and the photo still looks better and more realistic.
So that's the first thing, development time. The other big thing is the painting is completely static, you can't repose the model without spending an equal amount of time making a new painting. With a photo you just have her move and snap another one.
That is basically what's happening with lighting in games. The vast majority of lighting is faked to emulate what RT gives you in real time without all the extra effort, effort that can be put into making other aspects of the game better and more visually appealing.
We won't see the benefits right away but if we want to see better and more dynamic worlds in the future raytracing is absolutely a big big deal.
I like this analogy. So much time and effort is expended to simulate that photograph and in the end, you're still constrained by the fact that your creation is entirely static and can't be moved around, changed or manipulated in any way without breaking the whole thing. The exact same constraint is placed on rasterized graphics, and if we're to move to fully dynamic worlds that also look, not even real, but simply cohesive, well there's really no other way forward.
I get the sentiment that rayy tracing might not be worth it right now, although I completely disagree, especially now with image reconstruction techniques like DLSS, but developers have to start somewhere. I think we all should be grateful that the literal holy grail of graphics rendering, the end game of CG graphics, is possible right now on consumer-grade hardware. I definitely didn't think we'd be in this position not even a couple of years ago.
I still don't understand people saying that the technology isn't 'there yet'. Whatever that means. I just finished playing through Control, with RT, all maxed out at 4K DLSS from 1440P and loved every minute. It is 'there' on current technology, and is only getting more releases going forward, including in one of the biggest games of the year.
Control with ray tracing was amazing, the reflections in the office space glass walls where tremendous and added a lot more to the experience than I would have initially thought.
RT is impressive and for sure a game changer when it comes to graphics, but I'll prioritize fps over it. I'll enjoy some good graphics for like a few hours, get used to it then forget all about it. Gameplay and fps will always be on top, well at least for me. We'll eventually get to highFPS with RT norm anyway either by optimization/ good implementation/ better techniques. We'll surely be there by next gen cards.
I also just finished Control yesterday. My 2080 couldn't run full 1440p/60, but with DLSS it ran perfectly at 60-80FPS (VRR) with all ray tracing cranked to the max. The reflections especially added a ton to the experience and look of the game. I completely disagree that it's overhyped, it's the biggest jump in quality since PBR materials.
People need to stop making this argument. At least for this generation. Today's hardware is too weak to do path traced lighting on anything other than the likes of Minecraft and Quake 2. If anything RT is currently increasing the workload of developers.
I think RT is a bigger deal than some make it out to be, evident by some people only thinking it makes "fancy" reflections possible. Most of the time RT is seen as a visual features but it can improve AI path finding and audio, too. It's literally a revolution.
I dunno if that's viable yet, but seeing the countless path traced Minecraft videos had me thinking about gameplay elements based on RT. What if a puzzle is more than use item XY and bring it to the door? What if the task is, you need to let purple light shine on the button scanner and now you have all the various ways to deal with it?
Use items or reflections? Use a purple sword you found earlier? Why not use different colored glass to make the light shine purple onto the button? It opens up possibilities only possible in a scripted matter before.
I dunno if that's viable yet, but seeing the countless path traced Minecraft videos had me thinking about gameplay elements based on RT. What if a puzzle is more than use item XY and bring it to the door? What if the task is, you need to let purple light shine on the button scanner and now you have all the various ways to deal with it?
Use items or reflections? Use a purple sword you found earlier? Why not use different colored glass to make the light shine purple onto the button? It opens up possibilities only possible in a scripted matter before.
THANK YOU.It seems many people don't understand how lighting in games works and that's fine since you're not all knowledgeable about game development (and I'm certainly not an expert but have some knowledge of it). Here is an example to maybe illustrate both why many people aren't seeing a huge difference now vs why it's actually a big deal. This is a digital painting:
and here is the original photograph:
And people will say "they look almost the same, I don't see much difference at all". Yes, because the painter is very very skilled at recreating real life but the big thing is the painting took hundreds of hours while the photo took a couple of hours, and the photo still looks better and more realistic.
So that's the first thing, development time. The other big thing is the painting is completely static, you can't repose the model without spending an equal amount of time making a new painting. With a photo you just have her move and snap another one.
That is basically what's happening with lighting in games. The vast majority of lighting is faked to emulate what RT gives you in real time without all the extra effort, effort that can be put into making other aspects of the game better and more visually appealing.
We won't see the benefits right away but if we want to see better and more dynamic worlds in the future raytracing is absolutely a big big deal.
So many people throw away RT as useless when they grossly underestimate the amount of time devs can save by implementing it. I can't wait until it becomes the new standard.
In the future it WILL be a big timesaver, when we go from some individual RT features that replace SSR/AO/GI to the full Pathtracing deal.
In the meantime, I think the new Real Time Lighting System and the new LOD Unreal Engine presented are a bit more interesting. Both looked incredible in the demo.
Ray Tracing is possible even at 60FPS on these new machines. GT7 is confirmed to be 60FPS, RT and 4K. The latter could mean 1440p or native 4K for all we know. But the point still stands there will be 60FPS games using RT on Series X and PS5.
I think PS6 and Xbox Next will be the consoles where we might see development cost decreasing slightly due to full pathtracing and some (matured) ML techniques.
I like the effect but the performance cost is just too big to me compared the gains of having it off.
I don't huge benefits on the image quality to be honest, but if it allows less development time and eases the pressure on the devs, I'm all for it.
I think the true start of the technology comes now with the new consoles, now everyone will start working properly on it might achieve higher advancements.
For example, I remember in the PS3 era in which Anti-Aliasing used to be such a huge problem, and then PS4/XBO era solved it with excellent temporal AA. I hope devs finds a good way to implement ray tracing as well
I think the true start of the technology comes now with the new consoles, now everyone will start working properly on it might achieve higher advancements.
For example, I remember in the PS3 era in which Anti-Aliasing used to be such a huge problem, and then PS4/XBO era solved it with excellent temporal AA. I hope devs finds a good way to implement ray tracing as well
I get the argument, but I would say that it is not 100% certain that the performance tradeoff will be worth it any time in the near future.
We have dedicated ray tracing hardware in cards today, most RT-enabled games are only doing a small set of effects, yet the performance hit is still massive. In order to change the development process, games need to support global illumination - which is much more expensive than what most games are doing today - and it has to work on your minimum target hardware specs. We may be a decade away from that point, and that's assuming that we continue to see some form of Moore's Law scaling in transistor cost and density.