Real Time Ray-tracing

So are they going to start using this heavily in upcoming games or is it still in the territory of "oh that's pretty" but not actually utilized for much more than tech demos and proofs of concept?

Is the problem that the software is currently outpacing the hardware, considering people are now demanding resolutions higher than 1080 and triple digit framerates, while it's hard for most RTX cards to push even the ray traced Quake above 60fps in 4k?

I haven't really heard anything new or exciting about graphics technology since like 2018.

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Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=SJ0NzZAkPlo
youtube.com/watch?v=ArmYWwWho9I
youtu.be/lyfTPG-dwOE?t=322
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_hardware-accelerated_PhysX_support
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

It will soon be in all upcoming AAA games, and even many indies since the engines make it easy enough. The software will improve to more efficiently use the hardware. youtube.com/watch?v=SJ0NzZAkPlo

>real-time
>recorded

hello fucko

The "better" graphics become, the less interested I find myself.

can someone explain raytracing to me like i have 1 INT

Yes, rendered in real time and recorded. As opposed to pre-rendered, like animated movies such as Shrek and Toy Story, which are processed out frame by frame on massive computer farms.

I don't know about that specific demo in the picture I posted, but a lot of these tech demos you are able to download the program and run it on your own computer.

in short no. Ray tracing has like 5-6 shader stages and it's going to get complicated to do anything that you would normally do in textures that might not be "realistic" i.e. magic fx. Rendering volumes or SDFs will also be a big no-no, not really possible. You will need an entirely new render pass/subpass to do that since raytracing isn't that programmable.

rays are traced

>in textures
I meant in shaders. i.e. fragment and vertex shaders.

this is a gimmick like Physx or hairworks or SLI made to get people to jump to over priced cards that arent really all that better than what they have for gaming, and on paper are better but in the field make only a few frames more

Okay, so it's kind of hard to explain, especially since I actually know more about how ray tracing works than current graphics tech works, but I'll try.

So current graphics are done through a process called "rasterization," the game projects the 3d shapes towards the flat panel that is your screen, lighting in games done with this method is mostly simulated and cheated, which is why we have dynamic shadows being harsh and blocky, and there are the cheaty methods to make places feel more "real" like ambient occlusion, where they essentially just bake fake shadows into the corners and such of rooms to give it a little more depth.
Everything is a fake approximation of what things should look like.

In contrast, ray tracing aims to be more of a simulation. It works in some ways like a camera does I suppose, and the process of rendering is more based on from the screen inward, rather than the rasterization process, which projects the objects from "inside" the screen outwards towards it.
For each individual pixel of your screen, ray tracing projects a path towards the environment of the game, it calculates what surfaces the path hits, and tries to gather what simulated lights, shadows, the reflectivness or transparency of the surface being hit and color the pixel accordingly.

Sorry if this is a bit confusing, but the main thing to understand is that the difference between current tech and this new ray-tracing bullshit is that it mostly focuses on realistically handling lighting to create a more detailed and convincing picture through actual simulation than the fake approximations of previous generation tech is able to manage.

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You are going to see this in every game in the future because it's on console as well. You can also say goodbye to performance too if you don't have any card with hardware raytracing. If some random guy can add RTX in his game (on UE4 which is also a very fucking popular choice) even though he has zero experience in coding, it's going to be a cakewalk for major developers.

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Anyone can add physx also so what? seriously user this is a god damn gimmick made to sell cards NOTHING more Nvidia physically could make a better price per performance than the 1080ti and now they are trying to give reason to jump ship from it

>People unironically bought a refreshed 1080ti with RTX beta test
LMAO

The cool thing about Real Time Ray Tracing is that once you've got it you can have as many light sources and reflections as you want with little to no increase in performance cost and it makes filling out a scene with lights much easier and nothing is cheated so you don't have to go in and fake every lighting effect, the RT handles it all for you automatically. I don't think most people realize how much lighting in games is faked and how many hours are spent by level designers faking those lights.

The obvious downside is the upfront performance cost of Ray Tracing is huge, so huge we're still years off from it replacing traditional lighting pipelines and it'll only be used to augment what's already there. I'm guess we won't start seeing fully real time raytraced games AAA games that are RT and RT only until 2030.

Its harder for hardware to run but easier for devs to implement (in 2-5 years) so yea there will be a lot of ray traced games.

simulates lighting realistically, freeing up dev time on pre-baked lighting

the new intel, amd, and nvidia gpus this year will have raytracing hardware. as will the xbox series x and ps5.

so yeah.,

clustered forward rendering already made that possible. the actual benefit is easy transparency

>but easier to implement
no it's not
there's like, 5 more shader stages to deal with.
it's so much more complicated now than just 'what's at this pixel?'

>goodbye to performance
just turn the setting off

we have had dynamic lighting for YEARS user WHY THE FUCK should we accept games taking it away from us and reselling it to us in a different package?
youtube.com/watch?v=ArmYWwWho9I

Another generation of shitty framerates and low resolutions. No thank you.

looks nicer i guess

Turning it off could possibly make the game look like shit because devs might not choose to implement traditional techniques because let’s face it, they are lazy as fuck.

my guy IT BARELY looks nicer shadows hide aging textures making games like F.E.A.R hold up better than ever 20 years from now RTX games are going to have terrible texture work comparably

hence the i guess. it'll just be used as another card exclusive gimmick like physx

Some AAA dev's will use it, games will look slightly better, that's pretty much it.

The difference is those lights are faked and very hard to make. With RT you just place a light-source and it does everything automatically, albeit at a very high performance cost.

Watch youtu.be/lyfTPG-dwOE?t=322

Ray tracing is a lot more than just dynamic lighting, user.
It's all lighting in the game, and it handles things like transparent surfaces and reflections as well, a lot of lighting effects are done through cheats, or rendered in statically, yes, even in games like FEAR.

One of the major things that is used right now is screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO) which is used to create fake shadows in corners and such to create an illusion of depth, which you can still see at work in the video you posted, note the corners of the wall and where the walls meet the ceiling.

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Yas Forums is probably the only place I've seen where everyone gets up and arms against costly technologies like these yet can't even buy 5 generations ago tech. Rich talk from poor folk.

>very hard to make
>entire game has tons of them
god bless modern game design laziness
its like using a jet engine to power my car user its 100% unnecessary its stupid and pointless why use that when dynamic looks good and makes the textures look better not only that things you dont see look better than things you can see, seriously why do we need to do the hardest shit for something that isnt worth it?
my boi I got a GTX1080 im not moving thank you very much

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What's the game he's playing with that superpowered girl? Looks mildly interesting.

control

I have a GTX 1080 as well. I'm sticking with it until we get something significantly better.
The RTX 2080 is quite obviously a cash-grab, and to show off the whole "oooh look what we can do" factor of the early raytracing.
I used an AMD 6970 from it's release date in 2010 up until I bought this RTX 1080 a few years ago, and the gap before I get a new graphics card will probably be the same, if not longer, since I'm planning to wait for there not only to be a graphics card that can push 4k ray traced graphics at triple digit framerates.

But you can (rightfully) say that the RTX 2080 is a gimmick card with no real reason to buy one, and ray tracing is scarce and underutilized in games currently, but it IS the future of graphics technology, especially since the current generation rasterized graphics has essentially hit a wall in quality that can only be solved with more and more expensive shader tweaks and increasing computation costs.
As mentioned, when it comes to dynamic lighting, each individual light becomes more and more work for the computer to process, and you eventually would reach a theoretical point where say, you wanted to make EVERY light in a game a dynamic light, every lightbulb, every computer screen, the sun itself, that the processing cost of managing all those lights would become far too immense.
Ray tracing, while it has a huge up-front cost, makes every light source added essentially free, and puts no extra strain in terms of processing power.

The other cool thing about it is that once you have ray tracing you get mighty fucked on geometry complexity (x resolution) since each ray has to traverse through an arbitrary amount of faces instead of scanning through a raster pipeline
> I don't think most people realize how much lighting in games is faked and how many hours are spent by level designers faking those lights.
no? MAYBE a TINY fraction of time will be spent putting in volumes to influence probe placement or overriding ambient values. everything else is negligible or wouldn't change at all even with a full path traced pipeline

>its like using a car with an engine to get around when I could just keep using my bicycle
Just because you're too poor to afford a car, doesn't mean they're inherently a bad idea, user.

I wonder how Deus Ex does their mirrors.
I assume it's a window to a cloned game world but they have mirrors on thin walls you can go behind which makes me wonder if there's more trickery involved than just that.
It's possible they used an invisible camera with the monitor as the "screen" considering how common security cameras are with monitors to watch them through.
That actually seems like a simple way to handle mirrors actually, why don't more games do it that way?

>I assume it's a window to a cloned game world but they have mirrors on thin walls you can go behind which makes me wonder if there's more trickery involved than just that.
That's pretty much it.
>That actually seems like a simple way to handle mirrors actually, why don't more games do it that way?
Shader effects are too complicated now. You can't just make a copy of the game world behind a screen and have it look correct.

except a bike is great in a city that would be baked lighting dynamic lighting would be the superior comfy choice and RTX is adding a jet engine its unnecessary

TL;DR

No hence why vrs/dlss and ai up scaling is a thing.
It will be sub 1440p native but with lots of meme trickery to get it to 4k 60hz or even 8k if they are feeling cocky (ai can also upsample frame rates now)
Hardware is stuck in a rut until better gpu and mcm tech comes along ddr5/hbm3+ on die then I don't really see any big jump till gen 10
Then enter vr into the mix which basically means you'll have to choose between rt or vr or high refresh resolution but not all at the same time.

>I assume it's a window to a cloned game world
that's what it is
>That actually seems like a simple way to handle mirrors actually, why don't more games do it that way?
Because it's very expensive

Raytracing won't be adapted for another 5 years at least
hardware needs to get more powerful for it to be worth it

>mfw Source has perfectly working moving camera's and you can literally make a mirror with them

It will be just like PhysX. Some games will implement it early to show what is possible but most wont have it.
As soon as the hardware catches up to have enough power to run it smoothly i will be the standard.

Physics chips aren't the standard though

How is physX a standard feature?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_hardware-accelerated_PhysX_support
the latest game to have it was Everspace lmao

It's powerful enough for 1440p 60hz that's good enough for morons with 4k TV's

Not needed since gpu/cpu accelerated physics
Raytraced physics when? The ai tensor shit should be good at simulations no?

>It's powerful enough for 1440p 60hz
Not really
raytracing right now is just bordering on being viable for real time, but it's kind of pointless because rasterization is still much faster for the equivalent result
When GPUs are significantly faster, this won't matter so much so we can afford to use the processing power on raytracing, which is less efficient but much easier to work with

and? PhysX STILL isnt the standard

>Not needed since gpu/cpu accelerated physics
That's the fucking point
Dedicated physics chips are a dumb idea
Dedicated raytracing chips might be a good idea

Ofc the hardware itself isn't standard but everything behind it. Hardware is now powerful enough to handle the physics just software based and doesn't need specific hardware for it. The same will happen with ray tracing.

I've been using the ray traced shader for Minecraft and a compatible (not the realism) texture pack that lets the shaders and textures fully interact. It does look better than a straight shader that adds/improves lighting. It does look better.

But does it look better to such a degree that I'm going to take a massive performance hit? Probably not.

>Ofc the hardware itself isn't standard but everything behind it
Physics engines aren't standard
The PhysX software engine isn't used that much anymore

Rdna 2+ is significantly faster though
It got incorporated into middleware so yeah it is as well as euphoria and havok
There is no dedicated rt chips per say just ai and tensor cores that are good at certain type of math that also does rt fairly well.
No doubt newer gpus will be more efficient and faster at it
Why do u want more than 30fps mor minecraft anyway? Unless your vr ofc

Now that the PS5 and Xbox Series X are confirmed to have ray-tracing, I think you'll find it being used a lot more often.

>Rdna 2+ is significantly faster
no it's not significant, real time ray tracing is still a meme, and will be until GPUs are 2-5 times faster than they currently are

It's mostly lack of dev knowledge keeping it from taking off. Quake 2 RTX is a shitshow that doesn't look very good by ray tracing standards and runs like ass. Control looks amazing and on my 2070 RTX it runs like a dream on highest settings.

You'll see it shine soon enough. With it going on consoles some of the best bells and whistles devs will get to it. Naughty Dog, Insomniac, I hope Epic really dives in too. Before asses get puckered I didn't say they're the best devs. But they push tech.

When used well it is a major difference and gorgeous. Finally darkness looks right instead of just pure black on everything. Reflections especially on particles and things like flares, is just jaw dropping when done right. I can't wait for Rockstar to get to it. RDR2 is the best looking game I've ever seen and it doesn't even use a few tricks out there.