Soooo, there’s a missing part here. The point (and drive) behind raytracing isn’t making games beautiful, it’s making them cheaper and less man-hour intensive to make/maintain.
The engine guys spend manyears every year working on that non-raytraced engine so it can do 150. They’ve done every cheat, every side step, and spent every minute possible making it look like they haven’t done anything at all.
The idea is that they stop making/updating/supporting non-raytracing engines and let the GPU’s pick up the slack. Then using AI to artificially ‘upgrade’ the frame rate with interpolation.
To see how far rasterization has been stretched, and how that holds back development - Path of Exile 2 has a tech talk about their bare minimum settings. Artists weren’t allowed to rely on anything that could be turned off. They begged the programmers for specific gimmicks, and turned that cheap nonsense into a million blades of grass, raymarched cracks in translucent ice, and soft shadows with no Peter Panning.
Or, picking one specific trick: ambient occlusion was half of why Crysis humbled $5,000 PCs. There’s a slide deck for how a superior version of the same effect was achieved in Toy Story 3 on the Wii.
Real-time raytracing was unobtanium for decades because we kept moving the goalposts. The entire 3D games industry is built on cheating around simple parallel techniques being too expensive. By the time hardware catches up to where doing something the simple way is feasible, complex software has faked a wild variety of other effects. Meanwhile: games are designed to rely on what’s available. All of the tells for proper path-traced lighting have either been faked or avoided. Games don’t even do mirrors, anymore.
There’s a reason RTX shows off games from the late 1900s.
It’s not just a time limitation either tho, it also opens up a lot of room for artistic direction and game design
I don’t think you could possibly make something like Control’s shiny black blocks world look decent without raytraced reflections.
Also anything with significantly large dynamic geometry usually either needs like half of the level file size to be duplicated for every possible state, or some form of raytracing, to work at all. (There’s also things like voxel cone tracing that do their own optimized tracing but they also don’t really work in 100% of situations and come with their own visual downsides)
It’s like when the unity game engine came out, somehow IMO, instead of having to program the whole thing up to your specific game, now everyone could make a 3D platformer.
It does, again IMO, take the soul out of games.
Heh, I can appreciate that. That was also said when people stop using ASM and again when games started running in Windows. Not running games in dos felt really icky.
True, even if there weren’t that windows border, you just knew windows were lurking behind the game somewhere in the shadows…
I think it was 98 when I finally had a computer powerful enough to play quake and burn a cd at the same time. Dual processor, SCSI disk, quarter gig of ram.
I had like a 1GB hard drive … I was poor.
The earliest publicly available engines were id software engines. Whenever id developed a new one, they released the old one for free. That’s why we got a lot of doom clones and those doom clones became whole new genres of games. Thief, half-life, counterstrike, duke nukem, serious Sam, Wolfenstein, call of duty and many many many more games are direct descendants of developers playing with open source engines.
If your argument is that games are worse because developers don’t need to build their own engines anymore, you are dead wrong.
Lol you just explained it yourself.
We won’t go back in time to change things, and it was obvious what was going to happen, and it’s not always wrong either, but you can’t just brush away that everyone and their grandmother had to make a 3D platformer when unity came out.
Good or bad, it generally led people astray IMO.
There were lots of engines out there back in the day, the ID one was just the most polished (by far), you still had to know what you were doing, not so much with Unity.
Don’t forget that temporal smear. I like to apply vaseline directly onto my monitor instead.
Don’t forget the 10 shadow copies of my car/weapon following me around. It’s like someone really liked having a trailing mouse cursor and thought everything should have it
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Not true. Screen space reflections consistently fails to produce accurate reflections.
Screenspace isn’t the only way to draw reflections without RT. It’s simply the fastest one.
Most gamers aren’t going to notice, and I can count on one hand the number of games that actually used reflections for anything gameplay related.
What I’m talking about is drawing accurate reflections and I don’t know any other technique that produces the same accuracy as RT
That’s like saying that “physics simulation is the only technique that produces accurately shaped water streams” - technically true but generally not a sufficient improvement over the shortcuts currently in use to make up for the downside that the technically most precise method is slow as fuck.
Game making is at all levels finding shortcuts and simplifications (even games about the real world are riddled with simplifications, if only the gameplay rules being a simplified version of real world interactions because otherwise it would be boring as shit) and in the visual side of things those are all over the place even with RT (the damage on the walls, the clouds in the sky, the smoke rising from fires or the running water on the streams aren’t the product of Physics Simulations but, most likely, the use of something like Perkin Noise or even good old particle effects to fake it well enough to deceive human perception).
Yeah, sure RT is, technically speaking in terms of vidual fidelity alone, better than the usual tricks (say, using an extra rendering step for the viewpoint of the main reflective surfaces such as mirrors). Is the higher fidelity (in, remember, a game space which is in many other ways riddled with shortcuts and simplifications) sufficient to overcome its downsides for most people? So far the market seems to be saying that it’s not.
CDProjektRed just showcased The Witcher 4 running RT with 60 fps on a PS5. Bullshit its too slow to be available for most people.
From an article about it:
Now, it should be stressed that this is a build of The Witcher 4 specifically designed to show off Unreal Engine’s features. Yes, it’s running on a standard PS5, but it’s not necessarily indicative of the finished product.
So that’s like saying “under laboratory conditions it has been demonstrated to work”.
If you know what to look for you can notice it (mainly light bouncing of objects and tainting shadows with the color of those objects, such as the shadow above the green canvas here), but the difference to the non-RT version when one doesn’t know what to look for is minimal and IMHO not enough to justifying upgrading one’s hardware, especially considering that so much of the rest (the water in the streams, the snow in the mountains, the shape of the mountains themselves, the mud splash when a guy is thrown into the mud, the folliage of the plants and so on) has those visual shortcuts I mentioned.
Yeah, sure, it’s nice than shadows next to strongly lit colorer surfaces get tinted with the color of that surface, but is that by itself worth it upgrading one’s hardware?!
When most games with RT in them deliver that performance on one generation old hardware and all environments, then you will have proven the point that for most gamers it has no significant negative impact on performance.
If you think that video is representative of the release game’s actual performance and fidelity, I have several bridges to sell you.
I don’t see them lying but that’s on you I guess
Reflection probes are one way. Basically a camera drawing a simpler version of the scene from a point into a cubemap. Decent for oddly shaped objects, although if you want a lot of them then you’d bake them and lose any real time changes. A common optimisation is to update them less than once a frame.
If you have one big flat plane like the sea, you can draw the world from underneath and just use that. GTA V does that (like ten years ago without RT), along with the mirrors inside. You could make that look better by rendering them in higher resolution.
https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study-part-2/
Where RT is visibly better is with large odd shaped objects, or enormous amounts of them. I can’t say it’s worth the framerate hit if it takes you below 60fps though.
I haven’t personally played a game that uses more than one dynamic reflection probe at a time. They are pretty expensive, especially if you want them to look high resolution and want the shading in them to look accurate.
Depends on how you define “accurate”. Even full ray tracing is just an approximation based on relatively few light rays (on an order of magnitude that doesn’t even begin to approach reality) that is deemed to be close enough where increasing the simulation complexity doesn’t meaningfully improve visual fidelity, interpolated and passed through a denoising algorithm. You can do close enough with a clever application of light probes, screenspace effects, or using a second camera to render the scene onto a surface (at an appropriate resolution).
The issues come if you know how they’re faking them. Sure, SSR can look good sometimes, but if you know what it is it becomes really obvious. Meanwhile raytraced reflections can look great always, with the cost of performance usually. It’s sometimes worth it, especially when done intelligently.
But, it takes a lot of work by designers to get the fake lighting to look natural. Raytracing would help avoid that toil if the game is forced RT.
Gamers needs expensive hardware so designer has less work. Game still not cheaper.
I took pickes and tomatoes off my burger, where’s my $0.23 discount damn it?!
Let’s assume cutting out tomatoes and pickles saved $0.23 per hamburger.
McDonald’s serves 6.5 million hamburgers a day.
That’s $500 million extra yearly profit for their shareholders.There’s actually a decent analogy there I think. The hamburger won’t cost less, because the service of customization it itself less efficient: serving customers with their preference of with/without is more expensive than just pickles for all. Likewise I imagine making a game that looks OK with/out RT is extra work than just with.
There is no analogy. It’s comparing returning costs per product (you need a new tomato per 5 burgers) to a one time costs that can be cut during development. And additional copies of a game don’t generate more costs.
There really isn’t.
The op comment was that gamers need to buy expensive hardware so that developers could cut on features/optimization.
The follow-up reply likened it to customizing your burger, but the better analogy (and the one I assumed) would be for McDonald’s to remove all tomato and pickles (saving money), and the user had to buy it themselves to add to the burger.
thats the same logic behind the really high hardware requirements nowadays.
studios just wanting to save time and cut corners, and you have to offset that with really expensive cards.
The difference is pretty big when there are lots of reflective surfaces, and especially when light sources move (prebaked shadows rarely do, and even when, it’s hardly realistic).
A big thing is that developers use less effort and the end result looks better. That’s progress. You could argue it’s kind of like when web developers finally were able to stop supporting IE9 - it wasn’t big for end users, but holy hell did the job get more enjoyable, faster and also cheaper.
Cyberpunk and Control are both great examples - both games are full of reflective surfaces and it shows. Getting a glimpse of my own reflection in a dark office is awesome, as is tracking enemy positions from cover using such reflections.
I have only ever seen Cyberpunk in 2k res, ultra graphics, ultra widescreen, ray-tracing and good fps at a friend’s house and it does indeed look nice. But in my opinion there are too many reflective surfaces. It’s like they are overdoing the reflectiveness on every object just because they can. They could have done a better job at making it look realistic.
For any other game, I’d agree, but cyberpunk being full of chrome is an aesthetic that predates the video games by a fair margin, haha.
My problem is more with wet surfaces and the likes. Walking around the city it feels like every little water puddle is mirror and a spoon can also reflect way too much. I don’t mind shining chrome body parts.
Oh, they are definitely intentionally overdoing it since 90% of said reflective surfaces are ads, often reflecting other ads in there. The game is such an assault of advertising that I’ve found myself minding the advertisements in RL public spaces a lot more.
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Ray tracing isn’t supposed to make things look better, it’s supposed to save development time
If you spend enough time with on lighting you van make static lights look better but that’s just it, it takes longer so it costs more
Raytracing is cool, personaly I feel like the state that consumers first got it in was atrocious, but it is cool. What I worry about is the ai upscale, fake frame bullshit. While it’s cool that the technology exists; like sweet, my GPU can render this game at a lower resolution, then upscale it back at a far better frame rate than without upscaling, ideally stretching out my GPU purchase. But I feel like games (in the AAA scene at least) are so unoptimized now, you NEED all of these upscaling, fake frame tricks. I’m not a Dev, I don’t know shit about making games, just my 2 cents.
Raytracing will be cool if hardware can catch it up. It’s pretty pointless if you have to play upscaled to turn the graphics up. And as you say, upscaling has its uses and is great tech, but when a game needs it to not look like dogshit (looking at you Stalker 2) it worries me a lot.
I feel like if you have the level of a 3070 or above at 1080p, pathtracing, even with the upscaling you need, can be an option. At least based on my experience with portal rtx.
Personally I have a 3060, but (in the one other game I actually have played on it with raytracing support) I still turned on raytraced shadows in Halo Infinite because I couldn’t really notice a difference in responsiveness. There definitely was one (I have a 144hz monitor) but I just couldn’t notice it.
No you’ve pretty much hit it on the head there. The higher ups want it shipped yesterday, if you can ship it without fixing those performance issues they’re likely going to make you do that.
Optimization is usually possible, but it is easier said than done. Often sacrifices have to be made, but maybe it is still a better value per frame time. Sometimes there’s more that can be done, sometimes it really is just that hard to light and render that scene.
It’s hard to make any sweeping statements, but I will say that none of that potential optimization is going to happen without actually hiring graphics devs. Which costs money. And you know what corporations like to do when anything they don’t consider important costs money. So that’s probably a factor a lot of the time.
The joke is, LCD smear anyway on low framerates.
I don’t know but Path Tracing makes CBP2077 and Alan Wake 2 looks like a real next gen game.
Cy Ber Punk? interesting
There is a real reason to not use the “C + P” initialism in online chat these days… on some platforms it’s likely to be flagged & reported by automods/bots/Eye of Sauron.
But I love CP!! It’s so next gen!
That’s him, officer, right there ☝️🤓
I think RayTracing is pushed so hard by the industry because it gives manufacturers an excuse to force consumers to buy better cards to get “the very best”. I have a 4070 and I never use RT.
i wish they would just make more gpu so they aren’t so supply limited geez
Why would they want to do what’s bad for them and good for us? They’re a corporation:)
That’s why I will literally never support Nvidia. AMD isn’t perfect but at least they play nice with open source.
When I had a PS5 and Cyberpunk, I would sometimes switch ray tracing on and off to see if it made a huge difference. Well, the frame rate would be capped at 30 with it on…and I suppose if I stopped and looked around for a bit, it was noticeable, but honestly, I preferred the higher framerate. I’ve yet to see a game that really benefits from RT.
It’s mostly developers that benefit from RT long-term. Not now while it’s optional, but once it becomes a requirement, they can cut a couple of time-intensive steps from the development pipeline.
Can’t wait until my GPU needs 1000W to run :'(
Maximise your RTX performance with this one crazy hack!
Ray traced reflections: on
Ray traced everything else: offI’d argue reflections are nowhere near as nice looking as RTGI. If anything, switch reflections off.
But muh puddles! Night City is nothing without those gorgeous, mirror–like puddles.
Also caustics and volumetrics, if your game has those.
“I have a shitty computer and can’t play my single player game at imperceptibly fast frame rates boo boo boo.”
Raytracing is being pushed so hard by the industry because it makes things easier for devs as opposed to making the games look better for the customer.
There is absolutely nothing about raytracing which makes it “easier” for devs compared to a traditional render pipeline.
The extra performance rquirements alone mean you’re going to be doing more work elsewhere to make up for it, and that’s ignoring the current bugs/quirks with RT in whatever engine you’re using.
I thought the ultimate goal was to encapsulate the lighting system entirely inside the engine to stop programmers/artists needing to micro manage light sources. Presumably if a game only supported ray tracing then they could interact with an environment at the object level and trust the lighting would work in a life-like manner without having to be confected as part of development.
trust the lighting would work in a life-like manner
Ah we’ve had raytracing for a long time already, and you can download something like Blender and play around with it yourself. You’ll quickly discover that just because it conforms to some real-world principles (and works in a reliable manner) doesn’t mean it’s a magic tool that Just Works and immediately makes anything look good.
You still have to setup your world lighting (point/sun lights, skyboxes, emissive materials, whatever), adjust it to get the look you want, and your hardware requirement for testing this are now increased.
Raytracing is nice because it can make things look even better, not because it replaces parts of the workflow.
The extra performance rquirements alone mean you’re going to be doing more work elsewhere to make up for it, and that’s ignoring the current bugs/quirks with RT in whatever engine you’re using.
No worries, we got upscaling and frame generation now!
Yes, you can skip simulating GI with many small lights. Not a game dev, I work in animation. Up until fifteen years ago this was still a regularly taken approach to lighting scenes, before the advent of pathtracers
Early 3D graphic rendering was all ray-tracing, but when video games started doing textured surfaces the developers quickly realised they could just fake it with alpha as long as the light sources were static.
Unless you consider wireframe graphics. Idk when triangle rasterization first started being used, but it’s more conceptually similar to wireframe graphics the ray tracing. Also, I don’t really know what you mean by ‘fake it with alpha’.
rt is a marketing trick very few games are made in a way that makes it look better
I’m running a 4070s
CP2077 with RT is around 50fps with dips. Without RT I sit at 90fps with max settings and 144p
I am waiting for the GPU’s to use the rotating kinetic power of the fans to feed back into the GPU to give them ERS boost like in formula 1, when scenes become to graphically demanding. If you steal my idea that is intellectual theft and I will be sad!
