*Instead of developers having to use thousands of tricks, filters, shortcuts, and post-processing algorithms very carefully arranged and stacked, ray tracing simulates light waves to arrive at the same end result the same way the world actually works.
Ultimately, ray tracing will mean the vast simplification (and therefore cost reduction) of the way visuals in games are produced. Which I’d wager is why it’s being pushed so hard.
Sure not going to argue. Though it is still drawing on computing power much how ai does which is the point of the post pointing out how it drives hard on gaming boxes.
Although in this case Nvidia’s ray-tracing does actually utilize AI. Both for image upscaling as well as (iirc) optimizing the number of rays needed to be cast for a mostly accurate image.
Basically, a scene in a game has a bunch of objects in it.
It’s not to hard to just light them, but it doesn’t look that good. Most games want to have shadows, reflections, that sort of thing.
The traditional approach is to use a bunch of extra manual work by pre-calculating a bunch of stuff.
Ray tracing works by simulating how physical photons bounce around in real life. It’s existed for a long time; they’ve used it in animated movies for decades.
The issue with games is that we haven’t had hardware capable of doing it in real time until quite recently.
Edit:
That is to say, if you want to animate water or a mirror with ray tracing, you know where the camera is in the scene, and you know where the water/mirror is, so you know the angle the reflection would have come from. So you bounce the photon back that way til you get to the light source.
I’m surprised they didn’t go with the fact that ray tracing shoots rays out of the camera rather than having light radiate from light sources.
“That’s a scientifically outdated view of how light works! Light enters your eyes, not the other way around! What is this? Emission theory? Are we back in the 1600s? They’ve played us for absolute fools.”
Exactly ! this makes the problem potentially millions of times easier, since you know with certainty that every ray fired is going to contribute to the image, whereas firing rays from the light source would guarantee you never see most of them, the processing power is wasted and your image never converges
Are you sure? The way I understand it, ray marching is not something that can really replace ray/pathtracing, it’s mainly used for rendering signed distance fields which is cool if you want to draw fractals and stuff, but not very efficient for classical geometry
Just a side note: simulating light in a 3D environment is the stuff you could use to write a fucking phd, no joke. And another if you can figure a way to make the algorithm faster
To be fair, lighting is the most important part of generating photorealistic graphics. Having realistic and real-time lighting makes it look so much more realistic
photorealistic … realistic … real-time … more realistic …
We had a tool for that: it was called IMAGINATION
The graphical fidelity fetish has complete ruined gamers’ ability to immerse themselves in make believe worlds without the game doing all the work for us
My tone is /s, but despite my hypocrisy I do believe this is half true
Its not like games that tried to be realistic before didn’t exist and not like games that purposely go for a non realistic style now are not a thing. I’m pretty sure we have more pixel style graphics games coming out now yearly than when they were actually a thing.
I wouldn’t be surprised. You probably have young people making games that have nostalgia for games made in the style of 8bit, more than the games that were made that way because of tech constraints.
“Fake it till you make it”. Using various techniques it is possible to simulate a fake ray tracing. It doesn’t need to look as real as in real life, just similar enough so you wouldn’t notice during gameplay.
AI frame gen and AI upscaling is what I am most excited about…
And if they are serious it doesn’t make sense, ray tracing, path tracing, global illumination, make a game leaps and bounds more enjoyable for me. Realistic lighting is everything, I cannot wait for the day they finally get the new global illumination system in star citizen…
For quite literally years I couldn’t remember the name of that game so thank you! I use VICE these days as an emulator and one of my friends had that game but literally couldn’t remember the name.
I remember that too. So many memories… Curious as to whether you were an Amiga person too? I’ve found Commodore wasn’t very well known at all in the US but the UK, Australia and most of Europe it was super popular.
I had an Amiga 1000 and A590 hard drive after they were obsolete, but it was almost solely used for writing (probably terrible) music with OctaMed. A friend had an Amiga 500 and it was pretty cool. There was also, oddly, an Amiga dealer on the square in the Indiana town where we lived and we got to be friendly with them. I used to hang out in their store and play with the CD32. There was a pretty fun game called, I think, Psychopath, where you’re being chased by a serial killer.
I also had a friend when I was younger whose mother pirated pretty much every C64 game for him. It was amazing how many games he had. He eventually got tired of me coming over because I only wanted to play with all of his C64 games.
Hahaha, I remember OctaMed. My older brothers had A500s then A1200s. I had a CD32 for a while too until realised it was a dead platform (although Liberation kicked arse).
I know that feeling lol, I had ‘friends’ who were only friends because they got games from Singapore and the UK and I’d just want to pirate them but we weren’t actually friends.
What’s funny to me is that I didn’t know his mother was pirating all of these games until I was much older and realized none of them were on commercial floppies.
But I don’t have any room to judge, not that I would, because my brother gave me a whole bunch of pirated Apple II games. I had an Apple IIe and my grandparents had the C64 (but it was basically mine because they didn’t know how to use it).
Yes I did, still choosed to run games without raytracing on ultra without any upscale. Of course I did notice some (imho!) minor nice lighting and refraction stuff with raytracing, but for me these never justified the performance loss and the soft look of an upscaled image.
Therefore I’d rather choose not to play with raytracing and I don’t have the feeling that I miss something :)
The biggest reason your not seeing much benefit is because a) the tech hasn’t matured to a point where rasterization techniques can’t produce the same effect and b) devs aren’t developing games with raytracing in mind.
Honestly, the most impressive examples of raytracing have been Nvidias tech demos, more specifically Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft RTX textures.
It’s gonna take time for raytracing to impress but when it does it’s going to blow your mind.
I don’t know man, some people unironically thinks the earth is flat, that if a supernova happened in our galaxy the earth would blow up or that Volkswagen is pronounced with an English v and not with f despite listening to a German explain the German v. You can never tell when it comes to internet strangers.
Most of the comments (at least when I opened the post) were talking about RT as if it all does is ruining performance and shouldn’t be used.
After playing Portal RTX and Quake 2 RTX, my opinion is that what we really need are games that fully embrace RTX as their rendering. Lower poly count, use materials more, lean in onto the cool lighting.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077 use RTX, but it’s just painted over so it is very expensive for what it brings to the table. Sure it’s more accurate and having reflections is neat, but it costs more than some shadow maps and doesn’t beat good artistic design.
Yea were still in that transition period. One of the other problems is having RTX requirements only. Eventually the GTX cards will have to die out in order for this to be achieved though.
Yeah, we will only start seeing games that fully rely on raytracing when low-mid tier GPUs will be able to support at least current day RTX 3070 performance. As in, you can do better but at least you can run stuff fully in raytracing.
You know, that’s fair. Most of my experience with RTX in games so far been in first person shooters and they’re kind of lacking in environments like those.
Mostly stuff like slightly better lighting in Cyberpunk or the flickery caustics in recent Robocop game. Bonus points for the games that implement RTX reflections and shadows but don’t have your character reflect or cast a shadow.
Yeah I think that’s definitely what we should thrive to achieve, 4K @ 30fps is stupid, frames per second are way more noticeable than pixel density on most gaming setups
I realize everyone has their own preferences but I opt to run my PS5 in 1080p more often than not, and that’s on a 55" 4K panel. To me the smoother experience is completely worth the trade off in density. I hate running things in performance mode and getting 20-30fps. It looks choppy, feels sluggish, and is an inferior gaming experience for just about every type of game in my experience. On desktop I also prefer to force 1440 when playing on the TV. That display can only do 60hz but still feels better to me. The desktop card can put out a much better 4K experience, but I still feel like it’s not worth the fps drop. I’ll take stable 60fps vs a wobbly 40-50 all day.
What ps5 games are you playing that get 20-30 fps in performance mode? All the ones I own, which is almost every major ps5 title, has performance modes that either do 60fps dynamic resolution, 1440p60 wrapped in 4k, or 40fps at 4k120, or dynamic 4k60. Some get 45+ on average with unlocked framerate and dynamic refresh rate.
What desktop card do you have? Must be a pretty pricey one to outperform the ps5 at 4k. My 2070 is smoked by the ps5. I’m going to upgrade to the 5070 when it comes out.
Does the ps5 still not support native 1440p? Is that why you pick 1080p?
Most games don’t give the option of resolution, it’s just “performance” or “quality” in the game menus. So I set the system to 1080p in the settings primarily because the PS5 thinks my display won’t support 1440, which holds water because I have to force it on my desktop. I don’t have the option to force on my PS5 I don’t think. Do I?
And yeah, I get awful jittering on just about every quality mode but I don’t think I’ve tried it since setting it to 1080. I probably should! The ones I know for sure were horizon FW getting CRAZY slow on quality, that was def 4K because it was one of the first games I got. Ghost of tsushima was a little better but iffy in entire sections of the game. Returnal was probably the best, and the only one I can remember not forcing to run in performance mode. Lords of the Fallen is most recent and it is BAD in quality mode. It’s rough even in performance mode in big sections, but makes sense because it’s one of the first UE5 games available.
My GPU is a Gigabyte 3070 of some kind. For all the hate it got for having low RAM (justified) it still smokes most games I run but again - I do 1440 almost exclusively, and disabled ray tracing for the lost part. It’s a giant leap up from my 1070 which honestly was fine, but could only do 1080p 50-60fps for most games when I finally upgraded, and def struggled with some of the newer games.
Ahh you said performance mode was getting 20-30, I think that may have been a typo?
Horizon gets a pretty solid 30, but it’s much better at 40 for sure in the performance mode. Ghost you should just run in performance mode also, it’s a PS4 game, so it can crank the graphics pretty high and still get a solid 60fps. I don’t think I’ve ever even tried the quality mode in that one. Returnal is 60fps no matter what if I remember, but I could be wrong. Most games run at 60 in performance, which is why I was confused when you said 20-30. Performance mode will also automatically adjust internal resolution while still outputting 4k in most cases, so you still get your interface at native resolution. Demons Souls for example, runs at 1440p60 with 4k interface and it’s so gorgeous.
Oh yes that’s my fault, I meant quality mode for anywhere I said that I don’t get 60 fps pretty much. I feel like I get 50-60 in performance mode on horizon but some of the more lish sections are pretty bad. I run basically every game in performance mode because to me the smoother experience in play is worth the dip in graphical fidelity.
Yeah Horizon really struggles when you’re trying to get 60, it’s much more stable at the 40fps 120hz mode, but that only helps like… 3% of people at most.
I might be wrong, but even for games like Cyberpunk 2077 there is a finite set of world states that define lighting conditions (time of day weather etc.).
So prebaking lighting information for all these combinations and then figuring out a way to create transitions between them would maybe not be the perfect representation, but best of both worlds.
However, given how fast RayTracing improves hardware-wise, in my opinion it would make no sense to even consider researching and developing a solution of that kind.
The problem with prebaked is you can’t have dynamic effects show up with the same quality as the prebaked light maps. Think of a car driving down the road or an explosion. I think ray tracing is great and in 5 more years when GPUs and game development has advanced further it will become the standard.
Totally agree on that. When the first generation RTX cards launched, I was pretty sure that it was just going to be another gimmick like PhysX, but today, it’s an inevitable future.
I’m not really sure how PhysX was a gimmick. It had a weird implementation due to hardware restrictions initially, but is still used today on your bog standard GPS.
It’s actually a great example of a tech that had this weird transition period at first, when the hardware wasn’t advanced enough to support it by default, and is now just a standard tool to make games look great on average hardware.
That’s exactly my point. Raytracing is being shoehorned into things without them being optimised specifically for it at the moment. That doesn’t mean we should stop developing the tech entirely because people are implementing it poorly most of the time.
How do you "optimize’ it? You would think with so many game companies using it that if there was a better way than there would be at least one title with optimized ray tracing. The issue is the computational requirements for convincing ray tracing. When Toy Story 1 was rendered originally it took 45 minutes to 3 hours to render a single frame of video. Give it time and the GPUs will eventually be fast enough. Baby steps with new tech.
Optimization is not an on/off switch. All companies are optimising their implementation to the best of their ability/budget. As coders get more familiar with the tech and it becomes more commonplace, as well as work being done by graphics card companies on their drivers, it will reduce the computational requirements over time. There’s a hell of a lot of work that goes into graphical processing on hardware, software, engine and game levels to make things look better for less computations, it’s not just “tell GPU to do simulate every particle from the sun”.
There’s also the other side of the issue. As tech gets better, devs are less incentivised to optimise their crap. Which leads to games that look and function the same as older games, but are now bloated beyond belief.
It’s a strange paradox of tech innovation. The more powerful our tech becomes, the less we feel like properly utilizing said tech.
Correct. This meme templates is a unreasonable Statement paired with outdated arguments and modern images/facts poking fun at idiots. It also commonly confounds the reason for the thing with something easily observable.
When I got my oculus quest I played it as often as possible. That’s the problem though, it just doesn’t make sense to play it almost ever.
If I were a teenager or someone who lived alone I could really get into it. The problem is disconnecting entirely from everyone around me for a game.
With my Steam Deck or my Switch, I can put my kid on my lap and play. I can sit it down easily and help my wife with a chore. I can walk around at work in my downtime and play.
VR is awesome. I absolutely love it. I just don’t have time to fuck with it. I would imagine that’s the case for most people.
I have two kids and very little gaming time, but more than 75% of that time I spend in VR. With the increased immersion/escapism I have completely abandoned desktop gaming. Playing FPS on desktop just feels silly now
I guess it really depends on lifestyle and career and age of children and all that.
I get really stressed when I disengage from my family for too long and can’t see what’s going on around me.
I’ve played VR at work. It’s fine for single player games where I can pause and come back. Multiplayer games get really frustrating though when every 5 minutes you’re being pulled out and you can’t just jump back in.
I love VR. I just can’t seem to find the time to fully immerse and escape.
I agree with you on shooters. I am insanely good at Pavlov and when I jump into something else (non vr) it just feels so restrained. Moving around and actually feeling like you’re firing your weapon is a big deal. I’d like to get something to attach my controllers to at some point with some weight so it feels even better.
Yeah my play sessions are usually when everyone is in bed so cutting myself off from other humans isn’t an issue! Looking at my backlog of games that require longer sessions and it’s just not gonna happen with my current lifestyle.
A few years back when I had more time I messed around in Skyrim with a controller taped to a weighty staff. Managed to get it lined up perfectly in game and the trigger was usable. Using phones as motion sensors so I could walk without using a second controller. And voice control spells. That shit was crazy fun, and obviously incredibly dangerous heh. Can’t wait till VR is mainstream and we get more cool controller hardware.
I am son disappointed that 3D TV is dead. For few movies or documentaries it was brilliant. Exploring a prehistoric cave for example. Hopefully we still can play 3D with VR
Same here, it’s just a great evolution of gaming. 2D gaming is actually starting to feel obsolete the more I play VR.
I too have a family and a job and lots of things to do, and I still find time to do the cool stuff I want to do like VR. The “isolation” that the other person is talking about is not an issue for me because I can stay aware of people around me with my ears and stuff.
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