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[Balducci30]

I gotta be real. This whole talk about ray tracing and the push for it - I’m not seeing the major graphical leap everyone else seems to be seeing. Like fluid simulations and physics interactions - that all looks game-changing impressive to me. Ray tracing? Eh. I honestly didn’t mind whatever tricks they were using before to simulate reflections and lighting - am I missing something or have we just not gotten to a point where the technology is advanced enough to make a huge difference graphically in a normal game?

 

[Warnen]

I don’t notice it much in most games but something like control with lots of indoor hall ways and glass or the fortnite RTX demo with the glass walls it does look nice.

Personally high fps is more important but if I can get both all the better.

 

[LazyParrot]

I legit had to strain to see the ray tracing in the new Cyberpunk 2077 RT trailer. Unless it's a huge surface like a big-ass puddle or a glass wall I'm barely even noticing it, and I'm someone who has spent years working with offline render engines that utilize ray tracing, so I definitely know what to look for.

 

[Nikana]

It's like HDR. At first you will be like...yeah sure it looks different but idk if it's better.

But after time you'll get used to what a true HDR and ray Traced image offers and when looking at one without those enhancements you'll never be able to go back.

 

[GHG]

Depends on the implementation.

See Metro Exodus for how it's best implemented (IMO). Other than that, if the setting warrants it then the reflections can be nice (Control, deliver us the moon).

Basically talented environment artists will be able to get a lot out of it and produce stunning results. For everyone else it will be "everything is shiny" and reflections coming out of characters arses.

Prepare for this to be the equivalent of the "brown filter + over the top bloom" from the 360/PS3 generation.

 

[CamHostage]

Well, a generational leap sometimes doesn't feel like enough of a difference until you cross over, but then you look back and can't believe what you thought used to be "good enough". (I remember when PS1/Saturn was coming out and magazines were saying that the games were all the same as on 16bit but just done in 3D...)

I would recommend you look at NVIDIA's new Marbles at Night demo:


Not only does this look great, obviously (and the new Night version of Marbles is even prettier than before), but this doesn't have any of the baked effects that you're used to; they say everything is path-traced. So, you can see the lighting, you can see surfaces picking up that lighting from different surfaces, you can see the glows dimly brighten a few nearby objects, you can see reflections in mirrored surfaces, you can see the bright hit of a light source, you can see the directionality of global illumination playing across the full area as it pans the scene, you can you can see the shadowing, you can see the reflections, you can see the shininess... and moreover, you cannot see the fake effects that you're used to for creating a similar type of scene on a current-gen platform, because those fake effects are not there*. And that's what we're going to get used to, in the future. And when we get to this level of accuracy and simulated presence of reality, we will probably see the seams and flaws and cheats of what we're used to, and the difference will be a generational divide.

(*I say the traditional techniques of lighting and shading are "not there", but I'm sure somebody technical can school me on what NVIDIA is and is not pulling off in this demo.)

 

[VlaudTheImpaler]

Well, a generational leap often doesn't feel like enough of a difference until you cross over, but then you look back and can't believe what you thought used to be "good enough". (I remember when PS1/Saturn was coming out and magazines were saying that the games were all the same as on 16bit but now in 3D...)

I would recommend you look at NVIDIA's new Marbles at Night demo:

 

[Shrap]

It makes a huge difference in terms of realism. To me the most exciting application for ray tracing is going to be VR - that's where you'll really notice it and it will increase immersion massively.

 

[Danjin44]

I personally don’t care for it....at all.

 

[Mister Wolf]

It makes things like light, shadows, and reflections look more real. This is it vs the traditional lighting of Metro Exodus.

Yes you can bake lighting but that doesn't work with anything that's movable/dynamic from environment objects to game characters.

 

[Stuart360]

It will def help with people who like photorealism in games, which i do.
And when hardware becomes powerful enough that ray tracing is 'cheap' to use, it should in theory make it easier, cheaper, and quicker for devs to make games, and thats a good thing.

My problem with RT at the moment is how demanding it is, and how i dont even know a game is using it unless i know beforehand.
I dont think the consoles are powerful enough to do it justice yet. PS6/Xbox 5 should be though.

 

[MaestroMike]

I personally don’t care for it....at all.

y?

 

[Hawking Radiation]

Another thread that could easily have been posted in an existing thread.

Why all the goddamn clutter in this forum ??!!

Mod of War

 

[webber]

It can be transformative depending on how you use it and in what application.
It transforms Minecraft, Quake, Metro and Control.
Not so much for other games. Is it me or the implementation on Cyberpunk 2077 is kind of... not good?
I was looking at the new trailer and screens an there's this last gen look to their RTX diffuse illumination and reflections...

 

[Bryank75]

Depends on how it is used and the composition.....

Certain environments just don't really benefit and some with loads of light sources and luminous colours and reflective surfaces can look amazing with it.

Once they are clever with it...

 

[GHG]

A big thing people are not realising is that when implemented correctly it can save developers a lot of time. Example:

This is especially true for scenes or games that use static lighting.

Read more here:

Raytracing with Snow, Ice and the Cold Air — Experience points

Finn Meinert Matthiesen has worked on some of the largest titles from Crytek and talks to us about his latest project. Explore the breakdown of his Snow & Ice environment as he talks about how he focused on the big picture over smaller assets, his implementation of RTX, advice on realtime enviro

www.exp-points.com

 

[diffusionx]

It may sound silly but check out Quake 2 RTX. The lighting and everything looks great, the way you can customize it to see the flexibility and power of it is a lot of fun, and it comes with a 95% performance hit.

The NX Gamer video on Ratchet and Clank PS5 showed a lot of good examples of what RT gets you, stuff like subtle reflections, self-reflections (Clank's face reflecting off his metal), more accurate material behavior, etc., that current methods just can't do. Just look around a room in your house and you will see very complex, interesting lighting behavior that you *need* ray tracing to properly simulate and current methods can only fake it to a point.

That said, current methods have developed over 25 years to look good, so RT's advantages are subtle at the moment. We are still in the early days of RT but similar to stuff like SSAO, bloom, etc., it will continue to develop and get better and eventually all the current methods will be left behind (probably with the next console gen TBH).

 

[Stuart360]

It may sound silly but check out Quake 2 RTX. The lighting and everything looks great, the way you can customize it to see the flexibility and power of it is a lot of fun, and it comes with a 95% performance hit.

The NX Gamer video on Ratchet and Clank PS5 showed a lot of good examples of what RT gets you, stuff like subtle reflections, self-reflections (Clank's face reflecting off his metal), more accurate material behavior, etc., that current methods just can't do. That said, current methods have developed over 25 years to look good, so RT's advantages are subtle at the moment.

We are still in the early days of RT but similar to stuff like SSAO, bloom, etc., it will continue to develop and get better and eventually all the current methods will be left behind (probably with the next console gen TBH).

It looks very nice, and Minecraft looks insane at times with it, but you noticed the common thing with both games?, very old school games with blocky simple graphics.
I find it much harder to be impressed with RT with new games, its harder to see imo.

 

[Omnipunctual Godot]

I agree, although ray tracing can be used for more than reflections.

I legit had to strain to see the ray tracing in the new Cyberpunk 2077 RT trailer. Unless it's a huge surface like a big-ass puddle or a glass wall I'm barely even noticing it, and I'm someone who has spent years working with offline render engines that utilize ray tracing, so I definitely know what to look for.

Cyberpunk is just a game that looked amazing when it was shown years ago, but too much time has passed and it's starting to show. I think the game will be great, and the art direction is nice, but the graphics aren't very impressive compared to a lot of what we've seen this year.

 

[Great Hair]

drunk betty I has

 

[pokerlife]

It's like HDR. At first you will be like...yeah sure it looks different but idk if it's better.

But after time you'll get used to what a true HDR and ray Traced image offers and when looking at one without those enhancements you'll never be able to go back.

WISH THAT WAS TRUE.. OLED OWNER HERE WITH XBOX X AND HDR IS SIMPLY PHOTO MODE WHICH IS ALL PROCESSING AND EFFECTS TURNED OFF> SAdly HDR is a scam

 

[Danjin44]

y?

Other than making the games look more “realistic” it doesn’t do anything else.

 

[GHG]

Other than making the games look more “realistic” it doesn’t do anything else.

It can work with any art style. It's more about accuracy rather than "realism".

 

[Soltype]

It's just natural progression, we would have gotten to ray tracing sooner or later. We're just having growing pains so everybody's not on board.

 

[Grinchy]

I'm no expert, but from what I understand, there are different levels of implementation going on. A game like Minecraft or the Quake demo are completely lighting the game entirely with tiny raytraced points of light. They bounce and scatter in such a realistic way that you don't even have to fake, bake, or think about any of the consequences of light behaving the way it does.

Shadows, reflections, ambient occlusion, colors combining, ect, just happens because that's how light works. But with modern games made the way they are made, and with them already being computationally heavy, you can't just flip the "ray trace every point of light" switch and have it run well. So they will choose limited raytracing interactions and then advertise it as a raytraced game, confusing everyone into thinking raytracing is just reflections on the floor.

So not only will raytracing make games look significantly more realistic, but it will take all of that development time away that goes into faking everything. A developer could just say, "you know what? I want to move that lamp over here instead" and it will realistically light the room and produce all of those amazing effects without having to re-do or fake anything.

 

[PhoenixTank]

Devs have gotten very good at faking the effects over the years.

 

[Danjin44]

It can work with any art style. It's more about accuracy rather than "realism".

Again.....couldn’t care less. I rather see developers improve the frame rate, rather then bother with Ray tracing BS.

Great art direction is gonna make the game look good regardless it has Ray tracing or not.

The tech that will let us see less loading times excites me more.

 

[01011001]

one of them looks like a fucking glitch and the other looks like it should.

SSR (which is what you see on the top here) is fucking awful
and that's not even the worst example of SSR I've seen. Remedy's implementation in Quantum Break was truly disgusting at times and in Hunt Showdown it also looks like absolute ass in big bodies of water

 

[-Arcadia-]

I think it’s because most people could give a shit about reflections. I keep thinking of that one DF video with Alex about him going on and on about how the one-inch reflection, five feet away, in a handrail, was completely accurate.

Literally nobody else cares.

Sure, in an area with tons of water, or reflective materials, or puddles, the potential is there to look stunning, and I hope we see a lot of that, but for most areas, fakery is enough.

I‘d like to see more of a focus on lighting. That’s where the real progress is, imo.

 

[GHG]

Again.....couldn’t care less. I rather see developers improve the frame rate, rather then bother with Ray tracing BS.

Great art direction is gonna make the game look good regardless it has Ray tracing or not.

The tech that will let us see less loading times excites me more.

Read my post above, for good environment artists it will save them a lot of time. They can focus on asset quality and placement rather than waste time worrying about baking in shadows and lighting.

With the correct application it's far from BS.

 

[hussar16]

I think ray tracing reflections and shadows are overrated and a gimmick,lightning is where it's at just look at minecraft

 

[Balducci30]

Another thread that could easily have been posted in an existing thread.

Why all the goddamn clutter in this forum ??!!

Mod of War

What other thread? Christ.

 

[Danjin44]

Read my post above, for good environment artists it will save them a lot of time. They can focus on asset quality and placement rather than waste time worrying about baking in shadows and lighting.

With the correct application it's far from BS.

If you care about Ray Tracing more power to you, I don’t care. Like I said, I rather see developers improve the frame rate and load times, this things will actually improve gameplay.

 

[Tripolygon]

You're not seeing it because developers have been very good at using tricks to simulate it. The advantage of this is developers don't have to use tricks anymore, they just have to setup their light and it just works and looks how it is supposed to look.

 

[-Arcadia-]

one of them looks like a fucking glitch and the other looks like it should.

SSR (which is what you see on the top here) is fucking awful
and that's not even the worst example of SSD I've seen. Remedy's implementation in Quantum Break was truly disgusting at times and in Hunt Showdown it also looks like absolute ass in big bodies of water

The top one is so bad, this is actually my first time realizing it’s a reflection after two years of playing.

 

[Mister Wolf]

one of them looks like a fucking glitch and the other looks like it should.

SSR (which is what you see on the top here) is fucking awful
and that's not even the worst example of SSD I've seen. Remedy's implementation in Quantum Break was truly disgusting at times and in Hunt Showdown it also looks like absolute ass in big bodies of water

Yeah its real bad in Hunt. You can literally see them being created once the character stops blocking the water while turning. That flaw for screen space techniques isn't going anywhere neither just like baked lighting not interacting with dynamic objects. The only answer is raytracing or voxel solutions like SVOGI or Lumen which are costly as hell too.

 

[01011001]

The top one is so bad, this is actually my first time realizing it’s a reflection after two years of playing.

it is ridiculous how many games do this tho.

I mentioned Quantum Break. in that game there were elevators that were completely reflective inside, so that shit you see in that image... imagine if everything around you would do that!

 

[Balducci30]

Well, a generational leap sometimes doesn't feel like enough of a difference until you cross over, but then you look back and can't believe what you thought used to be "good enough". (I remember when PS1/Saturn was coming out and magazines were saying that the games were all the same as on 16bit but just done in 3D...)

I would recommend you look at NVIDIA's new Marbles at Night demo:


Not only does this look great, obviously (and the new Night version of Marbles is even prettier than before), but this doesn't have any of the baked effects that you're used to; they say everything is path-traced. So, you can see the lighting, you can see surfaces picking up that lighting from different surfaces, you can see the glows dimly brighten a few nearby objects, you can see reflections in mirrored surfaces, you can see the bright hit of a light source, you can see the directionality of global illumination playing across the full area as it pans the scene, you can you can see the shadowing, you can see the reflections, you can see the shininess... and moreover, you cannot see the fake effects that you're used to for creating a similar type of scene on a current-gen platform, because those fake effects are not there*. And that's what we're going to get used to, in the future. And when we get to this level of accuracy and simulated presence of reality, we will probably see the seams and flaws and cheats of what we're used to, and the difference will be a generational divide.

(*I say the traditional techniques of lighting and shading are "not there", but I'm sure somebody technical can school me on what NVIDIA is and is not pulling off in this demo.)

this looks amazing I agree - I guess where I’m getting confused is I haven’t seen any actual games using it to a degree where it’s actually made that much of a difference? At least in watching the videos - I don’t know if were just not there yet technologically? Someone mentioned the cyberpunk demo, that, ratchet and clank, footnote, a bunch of the games I see touting this as a feature it just doesn’t make it seem night and day to me. Like something I’d actually notice much when playing - although I do think the Minecraft thing does make a big difference. But does that mean games have to have shitty graphics in all other areas to get that effect?

 

[Guilty_AI]

Other than making the games look more “realistic” it doesn’t do anything else.

It can help a lot in proceduraly generated and highly dinamic enviroments.

In minecraft rtx, the way you design buildings changes completly since you can now utilize realistic light behaviour for illumination. A big cathedral in the game that would look completely dark can now look bright and alive with some well placed windows.

 

[Porcile]

It's important for the developer's pipeline. Maybe you don't notice it because you are just consuming the product but raytracing is easy to understand and control. That's important for developers who want things to look how they should look rather than using workarounds.

 

[Nikana]

WISH THAT WAS TRUE.. OLED OWNER HERE WITH XBOX X AND HDR IS SIMPLY PHOTO MODE WHICH IS ALL PROCESSING AND EFFECTS TURNED OFF> SAdly HDR is a scam

 

[Lethal01]

It will def help with people who like photorealism in games, which i do.
And when hardware becomes powerful enough that ray tracing is 'cheap' to use, it should in theory make it easier, cheaper, and quicker for devs to make games, and thats a good thing.

My problem with RT at the moment is how demanding it is, and how i dont even know a game is using it unless i know beforehand.
I dont think the consoles are powerful enough to do it justice yet. PS6/Xbox 5 should be though.

Even games like BOTW will greatly benefit from raytracing. Low resolution shadows aren't part of the "artstyle" and painters and anime aim to simulate the effects of bounced like all the time with their environments.

 

[Lethal01]

Again.....couldn’t care less. I rather see developers improve the frame rate, rather then bother with Ray tracing BS.

Great art direction is gonna make the game look good regardless it has Ray tracing or not.

The tech that will let us see less loading times excites me more.

A game with great art direction will look great without raytracing and will look even better with it in addition to getting more time or budget to focus on gameplay if we are talking about games totally built for raytracing.

 

[TheGreatWhiteShark]

Marbles Night is simply fantastic

 

[01011001]

It will def help with people who like photorealism in games, which i do.
And when hardware becomes powerful enough that ray tracing is 'cheap' to use, it should in theory make it easier, cheaper, and quicker for devs to make games, and thats a good thing.

My problem with RT at the moment is how demanding it is, and how i dont even know a game is using it unless i know beforehand.
I dont think the consoles are powerful enough to do it justice yet. PS6/Xbox 5 should be though.

how demanding it is is so overblown. Crysis remastered will have raytraced reflections on PS4 pro and One X!
it's all about optimisation.

 

[Danjin44]

A game with great art direction will look great without raytracing and will look even better with it in addition to getting more time or budget to focus on gameplay if we are talking about games totally built for raytracing.

I'm no expert on this but wouldn't ray tracing effect performance of the game, if it does I rather not have it.

 

[Punished Miku]

It makes things like light, shadows, and reflections look more real. This is it vs the traditional lighting of Metro Exodus.

Yes you can bake lighting but that doesn't work with anything that's movable/dynamic from environment objects to game characters.

I literally couldn't pick them out in a police line up.

 

[IntentionalPun]

It’s partly a time saver for devs isn’t it?

 

[Mister Wolf]

I literally couldn't pick them out in a police line up.

That's a "you" problem.

 

[Lethal01]

I'm no expert on this but wouldn't ray tracing effect performance of the game, if it does I rather not have it.

Sure, if you are saying Performance > everything then sure.
But if you care about art design or gameplay outside of FPS then you do kinda care about what raytracing brings.