Apparently the new hotness is Ray Marching, basically Ray tracing with circles
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
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“That’s a scientifically outdated view of how light works!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
Unironically yes.
I just want my eye candy sometimes :(
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
“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…
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.
I’m a bit behind the times game wise, can anyone explain how I turn on RTX in Doom?
I think it’s only in eternal? It’s just a simple toggle in the settings as long as your hardware supports it.
Ray Marching is awesome though https://piped.video/watch?v=9U0XVdvQwAI
Real time RT really is meh, but I like what they’re doing in CS2. Prebaked Global Illumination looks freaking fantastic.
removed by mod
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.
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.
Don’t worry bro just turn on fake frames and upscaling. Now we get shitty graphics AND raytracing at the same time!
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.
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.
It’s really moreso that raytracing nowadays is intensely poorly implemented when there is usually better ways to go about it.
We have the means to be efficient about our graphics. But instead we go about it in the most unoptimized ways imaginable
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.
Vr is the 3D cinema of gaming
3D cinema is more like light gun games. Kinda cool but it doesn’t really advance anything.
Man, now I’ve said that I miss the old Namco arcades.
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
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.
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
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.
Counterargument: my 3090 is my space heater
This, I can’t run my pc in the summer, makes the room far too hot
Counterpoint: I like pretty lights and don’t mind having to play at a suboptimal framerate if it means more detail that I’m going to notice and enjoy.
Also, I keep seeing people confusing photorealism with a lack of style, when that’s just not true. Pixar movies for example are photorealistic but stylized. You can have fancy lights and cool styles.
I disagree that pixar movies are photorealistic… They’re pretty solidly on the cartoon side of things
Pixar movies have accurate lighting which makes them look great. Lighting separates a good looking game from a great looking game and is more important than textures imo.
Main point aside, that isn’t photorealism tho. Photorealism is depicting something almost identical to a real life photograph or simply what most consider realistic graphics.
I would consider photorealism to mainly be light-based (prefix photo meaning light), but I get what you mean. I’d consider photorealism and realism to be separate. “I can see that existing” vs “I can see myself being there”
A better example probably would’ve been claymation, or pokemon concierge.
Edit: my definition of photorealism might be off.
Yeah I got your point but pretty sure photo in photorealism is just photograph. Not sure if there are any term like that for realistic lighting tho.
Am I the only one who thinks that Ray Tracing doesn’t even look good?
Apparently 90% of people can’t even tell so…
This tracks with every other graphic option if the person doesn’t know exactly what they’re looking for, in my experience. Most options don’t have such a huge impact, and are more just “yeah, that feels a bit better, I guess” once you get past the basic, obvious stuff like resolution.
Just tells you how many tricks have been developed to make rasterization look as good as it does. Fascinating, really. It’s always interesting to see how people work around a limitation.
The thing with real-time raytracing and pathtracing is that instead of being a workaround, it removes the limitation entirely, which is damn cool.
Just need faster hardware still, which will take at least another decade with how Nvidia keeps milking the smallest improvements gen after gen.
My brother and I upgraded our computers recently. I went with bang for buck and got a 6600XT, he wanted the RT experience and got a 4070TI. Playing cyberpunk on his computer was disappointing tbh. I expected more from almost a 400% more expensive setup.
