Getting the vibe that OP is being serious while using a template supposed to be ironic.
Seems odd to be angry about game graphics progressing. Imagine how it was during the 90s.
You may not like it, but Lara Croft pyramid boobs is peak graphics
“Pyramid” boobs and “peak” graphics.
I like what you did there ;)
This comment is right (and left) on point.
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…
games should look like they were made for the ps2 or else im not buying
PS1 or bust
i don’t see the benefit of raytracing…
Do you have a gpu that can run max raytracing at 1440p - 100+ fps?
I’m not saying it’s a worthwile investment, but if you CAN run it well… you’re going to.
What gpu can actually run 100fps with rt on 1440p?
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 cannot wait for the day they finally get the new global illumination system in star citizen
It’ll happen right after server meshing!
Don’t worry. S42 is feature complete.
Sure it is.
I
answered the callheld the line!
I don’t think so, it’s clearly an ironically hyperbolic statement
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.
Unirronically I agree with this. I still have yet to see a use case of ray tracing that makes it worth the 50% hit in fps.
Raytracing is good but the problem is that were are in a transitional period (and Nvidia keeps upselling it’s products)
Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive mode looks absolutely insanely good.
Can’t wait to play it on a graphics card I can afford in 20 years or so.
Me just quietly waiting for AMD to get competitive with ray tracing
Honestly all of the “it runs badly even on a 4090” stuff is talking about 4K with all the settings maxed - It runs at a solid minimum 30 for me at 1440p on my 3080 at nearly ultra settings. As long as you’re not expecting 60FPS at 4K, you can enable RT overdrive on affordable hardware.
A lot of the implications for ray tracing are on the dev-side of things. It’s a bit hard to explain without going into technical details.
Essentially, getting light to look “right” is very very hard. To do it, devs employ a lot of different techniques. One of those older techniques is baking the light on static objects, essentially pre-rendering where light goes and how it bounces. This has been done for a long time, e.g. even in Half-Life, the lights are baked for static geometry. So in a way, we have been using ray-tracing in games for a long time. however, it isn’t real time ray-tracing, as the information gets stored in light map textures, so there is no performance impact other than storing the texture in RAM/VRAM and drawing the texture together with others.
The inherit problem of that technique is that it only really works for static geometry. If you move your light or any objects in the scene, your lightmaps will no longer match. To solve this, there are mixed modes which use real-time lights, dynamic light maps, and other tricks. However, these are often subject to problems and/or the limitations of using real-time lights. Real-time light problems are: You can only do a limited number before getting a serious performance impact, especially if the lights produce shadows. Soft shadows, shadows in big areas, and very detailed shadows are extremely hard to do as well without some advanced tricks. Also, ambient occlusion and global illumination is not something you can just give lights (there is screen-space GI and AO, but they don’t look good in all circumstances, and you have limited control. There are also some other techniques some engines did for real time GI.).
Also there is the problem of baked light affecting dynamic objects, such as characters. This has been solved by baking so called “light probes”. These are invisible spheres that store the light data and the closest data then gets applied to the characters and other dynamic objects. This again has a some problem, as it’s hard to apply multiple light probes to the same object, so lighting might be off. Also, light direction is not accurate, which causes normal maps to look very flat in this light, and local shadows do not work using light probes. The same is done for reflections using reflection probes which are static. These are 360° “screen shots” essentially storing the reflection at that point in space. This however costs DiskSpace/RAM/VRAM, and it will not hold any information for moving objects (that’s why sometimes you can’t see yourself in the mirror in games). Also, the reflections sometimes look “out of place” or distorted when the reflection probe is too far from the reflecting surface (again, these cost VRAM and RAM so you don’t want to place them in front of every single reflective surface). It costs a lot of time to find the right balance. For the rest, usually screen space reflections are used, as any other real-time reflection is extremely costly as you essentially render the whole scene again for each local reflection. Screen space reflection is an advanced technique that works very well for stuff like reflective floors, but you will quickly see its downsides on very mirrored surfaces as it lacks information that is not on the screen. Some games like Hitman for example use the mix of those techniques extremely well.
Coming back to lighting, there are now better techniques used for example by unreal and some other engines (and now unity in experimental). The light gets stored in more predictable data structures, such as 3d textures. This way, you can store the direction of all light in each cell. The light then gets applied to the objects passing through those cells. This looks pretty good, and the runtime cost is fairly low, but the storage cost of such textures is a tradeoff of texture resolution and fidelity. These textures cost a lot of VRAM to store and without using advanced techniques and tricks, have their own limits (e.g. for scene size). It also costs a lot of time to create each time you change the scene, and it also doesn’t eliminate all problems mentioned above, like reflections, moving lights, etc.
Specifically, there is the problem of character lighting itself. Using light probes on characters usually looks pretty bad, as it removes a lot of detail of advanced skin shaders. Even with the above mentioned techniques, character lighting is still extremely hard to do. There is also some other problems, like ambient shadow in already shadowed areas, and light balancing for character versus scene lighting.
For that reason, most AAA games use separate light rigs for characters. Essentially floating lights that ONLY affect the character and move with them. When the mixing with the scene lights is done right, the rig adapts to the current situation in terms of light direction, color, and intensity. If you look in most AAA games, you can often see situations where rim-light comes from a direction where there is no actual light source. However, this way, the devs and artists have full control over lighting the characters. Essentially like a real movie production would have, but without the limitation of the real world.
Now, ray-tracing as you know it right now is not quite there yet, but eventually, ray tracing is the solution to a lot of the problems mentioned above. Things like polygon density, light count, global illumination, ambient occlusion, light direction, reflections, and much more are simply “there” for you to use. Now this doesn’t mean that it will automatically make everything look great, but with the overwhelming amount of different tricks that have to be used for current gen games to make the look good, it opens a whole new world of possibilities.
Also, something that will not directly influence the final game, it will eventually simplify things for devs so that more time can be invested into other things.
At this current usage of ray-tracing, it’s more like a gimmick, because devs will still focus most resources on the current ways to use light. This is because most people don’t have cards with sufficient ray-tracing capabilities. So for the moment, I agree that the performance hit is not worth it. However, eventually it might become the default way to draw games. While we are not quite there, in terms of performance, I think that things might become a lot more consistent and predictable eventually for raytracing.
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.”
That’s clever. Only trace the rays that the camera can see and probably cheaper to send some rays from the camera to the sun than vice versa.
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
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.
We have more indie pixel games coming out yearly than all of the original consoles put together during their lifetime I’m pretty sure.
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…
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.
RTX in Spider-Man/Miles Morales on PC was… Amazing.
Being able to see yourself swinging by windows in realtime, shadows from buildings…
It was worth the FPS hit.
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.
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
And if you do either of those, most games companies would love to snap you up right out of graduation.
And then lay you off when shareholders don’t like the cost of paying for a PhD.
What a stupid comment.
Yeah, it is really dumb. Almost as bad as suggesting game companies are looking to onboard people during layoffs.
Don’t worry bro just turn on fake frames and upscaling. Now we get shitty graphics AND raytracing at the same time!
This feels like one of those “VR in the 90s was shit so we should never develop VR” kind of things.
Isn’t VR still pretty shit?
It’s expensive, but a high end rig with a good headset (index or vive), it’s pretty great.
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.
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Didn’t quake bounce light 4 times?
Certainly not real-time. The colour lightmaps available with some video cards were baked in
The point is bounced light and global illuminaion was in games back then
Yeah but it was precalculated
Thanks, cap.
That’s debatable. Kind of like saying Donkey Kong Country was 3D because it used sprites made from 3D models.
But I’m happy if we just have different interpretations of the same facts.
The weird hybrid solutions that game devs are coming up with to beat out the old tech without doing full RTX is awesome. And for that reason I like RTX, because its pushing development of ideas that work better for today’s hardware and today’s applications.
Raytracing is genuinely cool as hell, but Nvidia needs to stop being a dumb cunt about it
Nvidia is succeeding (in business) by being cunts, In don’t know if they will ever not be cunts. 😂
But you can still buy freesync and g sync monitors, however it seems freesync won that battle. It’ll be a matter of time.
Don’t even get me started on adaptive sync. New Gsync monitors are finally capable to run VRR with AMD gpus now. Why do they bother still making them, then?
I like the way insomniac does it with their games on PS5 : priority on hitting 60fps and then raytracing.
Honestly I like ray tracing but I like 60fps more. I don’t care about resolution tho, 1080p is good enough for me. 1440p if I really want to push it.
4K was invented by TV makers to sell 8k TVs
1440 @ 120hz is the absolute sweetspot for gaming idc what anyone says. 4k is completely unnecessary
1440 looks nice up close, on smaller screens, but it’s definitely not got the pixel density to compare to 4k on larger panels. Both have their place and use cases.
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 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 just want my eye candy sometimes :(
Raytracing produces realistic visual effects without requiring tricks like ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, shadow resolution and so on, since those emerge as a result of raytracing anyway and are much more realistic. I’m currently rendering a Donut in Blender where the effects are clearly visible in comparison.
However, due to the high amount of optimization in visually impressive realtime rendering engines like game engines, I agree with you that I don’t see many benefits comparing ray tracing in games with contemporary alternative techniques.
Nevertheless I think that’s the future. In the long run, there’s nothing better, i.e. more accurate, than simulating the behavior of light when it comes to visual realism.
Also, baked lighting has another cost - nothing that is baked can be dynamic, and it has to be done during development, so it takes up dev resources.
Raytraced stuff happens immediately without tricks. All you need is the geometry and the materials to be accurate, and it should look right, no questions asked.
Once we get to a point where raytracing can be assumed even for low end systems, the problem where systems can’t run certain games could become a thing of the past. I mean, if manufacturers weren’t constantly bombarding us with planned & perceived obsolescence.
in the case where you have vehicles with explorable interiors (like the ships in Star Citizen), lighting has to be dynamic because lighting conditions change just as a result of flying around normally. The position of the sun in whichever of the two (current) star systems you’re in relative to your ship, and the atmosphere which may or may not be present outside, the position of cargo and objects/materials that will be receiving light and causing it to diffuse onto surrounding surfaces in a cabin also requires at least some kind of reference or it just feels BAD.
But the recent citizencon engine presentation showed some AMAZING new short cuts that give just enough visual fidelity without tanking the framerate that it scratches some kind of itch DEEP within the predictive modeling of the human mind… when light acts more like it’s supposed to, it’s fucking magical.
Ray Marching is awesome though https://piped.video/watch?v=9U0XVdvQwAI
