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[The Cockatrice]

Bonus points to Hitman for having accurate mirrors but if I remember correctly it wasn't Ray traced initially. Not sure if hitman 3 converted rt

Planar reflections. We've had that for many years but it seems cheap ass devs, especially those that use that trash UE4 forgot we had working mirrors 20 years ago. Most devs back then would render a scene twice for mirrors and even that was less demanding than RT. Now we can't get any kinds of reflections anymore unless we use RT...cmon. Fucking BS and people are eating that shit up.

 

[StueyDuck]

Planar reflections. We've had that for many years but it seems cheap ass devs, especially those that use that trash UE4 forgot we had working mirrors 20 years ago. Most devs back then would render a scene twice for mirrors and even that was less demanding than RT. Now we can't get any kinds of reflections anymore unless we use RT...cmon. Fucking BS and people are eating that shit up.

We're they planar. Wasn't sure If it was that or just the classic double rendering because of how sparsely mirrors were featured in the game.

Yeah screenspace really is a terrible form of reflection. Sure in very few surfaces it works just to give atmosphere like a diffuse floor or something but eventually everything became ssr and it looks awful

 

[The Cockatrice]

We're they planar. Wasn't sure If it was that or just the classic double rendering because of how sparsely mirrors were featured in the game.

Yeah screenspace really is a terrible form of reflection. Sure in very few surfaces it works just to give atmosphere like a diffuse floor or something but eventually everything became ssr and it looks awful

Yep, incredible use of planar might I say. It does use SSR for floors tho. A lot of games use planar reflections for buildings, I've seen it in recent Yakuza games like Kiwami 1 and 2 and Judgment series. We can fake a lot of things without sacrificing performance. raytracing and path-tracing are not ready for this gen. Maybe in 5-6 years.

 

[64bitmodels]

"Playable" framerates when the entirety of ocarina of time ran at 20fps, FF7 at 15fps in battles!
We are complaining about games now running in the 30-60fps range with real-time raytracing.

god fucking damn it....

FULLY 3D. THEY ARE STILL FULLY 3D GAMES. WHAT IS WITH THE READING COMPREHENSION OF PEOPLE ON THIS SITE.

Spyro, Crash, Mario, Sonic, etc ALL ran at 30fps or more. FULLY 3D. Almost 0 2D elements.

There has not been a SINGLE fully path traced game on consoles like Quake 2 RTX or Portal RTX that has run at a decent framerate... hell, they don't even exist. Raytracing on consoles in its current state is equivalent to a 32x game or Symphony of the Night: 2d games with a few 3d elements sprinkled in to accenuate the visuals. Lame ass shit like raytraced shadows (that you can hardly notice)

To RUN such a game you need heaps of AI covering the native image, generating fake fucking frames and pixels just so it can work properly. And that's on the most powerful consumer gaming hardware currently.


The Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64 didn't need such tech to run fully 3d games-hell even the Sega Saturn's pitiful 3d capabilities didnt need that lame ass shit either.

 

[Imru’ al-Qays]

"A dumbness galore demand" is a dumbness galore turn of phrase

 

[Loomy]

This bullshit got to 7 pages lol

 

[Umbasaborne]

We just need new consoles. The PS5 and XSX are very underpowered already.

Sounds like you need a pc, consoles will always be underpowered, thats why they can be sold at 500 bucks and not over 2 grand. The ps5 and series x are very appropriately powered for their price tags and the tech that was available while they were being developed.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Metro Exodus was good because even with RT global lighting it managed to run at 60fps on a PS5/3060.

That game was really underappreciated and the bad reviews kept me away from it for too long.

 

[winjer]

Metro Exodus was good because even with RT global lighting it managed to run at 60fps on a PS5/3060.

That game was really underappreciated and the bad reviews kept me away from it for too long.

Underappreciated? Bad reviews?
It has a user score of 90% on Steam. Most gamer's loved it.

 

[Turk1993]

This.

However, @rofif unquestionably got a point. When it all works, it's pretty fucking hard to find something looking better than UC4 (and this is all on PS4 Pro):








Those animations as well, not even Naught Dog improved upon how stunningly fluid and responsive U4 controlled while looking like this:

And in a way, those games did use some form of RT, all the way back to TLOU on PS3:






Resident Evil 4 Remake or Dead Space: Remake, both just released a whopping 7 years after Uncharted 4, are literal generations behind in this regard.


Honest to God, visually all I could think while watching that footage 2 days ago was that it looked like a less stable, ghosting Lost Legacy, with next generation geometry.

Just talking visually here of course, but I'm sure I could trick many people into thinking some portions of that Demo are from Lost Legacy. Don't have a video to compare as Streamable deleted all LL videos I had except for this one:




But in short, to me everyone is right in this case. Uncharted 4 is not a good example for gaming as a whole as @UnNamed said, and at times it certainly looks lacking as you all are saying.
And many bigger, outdoor chapters would improve drastically with the use of ray traced shadows.

Look most of those UC4 videclips look good but all of them look a several generations behind that UE5.2 demo, don't kid yourself. Nothing you showed even looks realistic or even close to real while that UE5.2 demo looked 90% photorealistic. I played UC4 & LL also on PS4PRO and PS5 on a 4K HDR OLED and it looks nothing like that UE5.2 demo. UC4 looks really good and for its time it was really good looking, but it still looks super gamey. The level of detail and lighting showen in UE5.2 blows everything out of the water that you have showed. There are those wow moments where the camera pans every special place you enter. But the moment you start to look around you notice quickly that its a game from 2016. Most of the assets are not even comparable to games released today let alone that demo, its just a good looking last gen game. Wait till you see ND full current gen exclusive game than you would see why UC4 is nothing special as for today.

But i give you the animations, they are still better than 90% games released today.

And in a way, those games did use some form of RT, all the way back to TLOU on PS3:

This is not RT lol, this is done with two spot lights. One spot light will be for the flashlight; if your engine supports light textures, this is the one you’d apply it to. The other will have a rather low intensity, and will be EXTREMELY wide. This will be your ‘fake GI’ light. Also if you notice the "bounce lighting" doesn't cast soft shadows like it would with RT. It still looks good and is effective, i was also impressed with it. Driveclub also uses the same tech for the car headlight.

 

[Turk1993]

These guys must be watching this thread

Starts at 5:57

 

[Loomy]

The disease is spreading! Timestamped (@9:53)

 

[ResetEraVetVIP]

The future of this, the future of that. I've heard lame assertions like that so many times. The point is that devs and publishers focus on what people want, if it is high frame rates, then that will be the objective. Period.

People didn’t want 3D gaming either or the internet…

 

[RCU005]

Ray Tracing is going to make the games look amazing, there's already some games or demos where the improvements is massive, but it's not for now. This generation shouldn't even have it. They barely can do 4K.

4K shouldn't have existed in the PS4, and therefore, PS4 Pro and One X shouldn't have existed. They weren't able to do 4K right, and this is the generation where they should've done it for the first time.

 

[ResetEraVetVIP]

Listen. I am not here to break down uncharted 4 tech.
All I know is when a screenshot from that game comes up on my randomizer, it's usually the best looking one, with Death Stranding right next to it.
And when I replay that game year on year, I am somehow always more impressed.
The game just looks good. better than most stuff nowadays. Better than re4 remake even I would say for some part...
It's not better than tech demos of ue5 nowadays... but nothing is... We are either talking cg here, tech demos or games and as far as games Go, I put tlou2 on first place, uc4 on 2nd and death stranding on 3rd.... and now come to think of it, re4 remake models deserve a good spot somewhere up there

Don’t forget Forbidden West, Spiderman MM and Ratchet

 

[Johnny Concrete]

These guys must be watching this thread

Starts at 5:57

Yep, thought about this thread as well as soon as I heard that.

There are so many rendering features that can be ‘raytraced’, that it is too hard for the avarage joe to distinguish the differences between them.
Everything gets labeled as ‘supports raytracing’, but for me personally it doesn’t add much if it isn’t at least GI.

A RT reflection can look identical to a Screen Space one in a lot of angles. Except without some of the SS artifacts. But is so much more expensive to render. So in most cases I would say don’t bother with them, until we get hardware in consoles that can easily pull that off.

 

[MarkMe2525]

I'm sure this has already been mentioned a few times, but ray tracing in the manner that it has mostly been implemented, is a waste. Now what I'm seeing with lumen is absolutely the future and we are better for it.

 

[saintjules]

Edit: Nevermind, already posted.

 

[BabyYoda]

It is the future of gaming graphics though. Eventually graphics cards will likely be ray tracing monsters, with rasterisation being their secondary function for backwards compatibility.

Until then, yes it will be a waste of resources for the most part, with the difference between a game that has RT turned on and then off having only the kind of negligible difference that it takes Digital Foundry and their magnifying glasses to spot the difference. I can help them, the difference is the smoke coming out of the PC tower!

 

[Cyborg]

The real gamechanger for me is NVIDIA DLSS 3. These innovations enable developers to push the limit, give me full details and leave RT for what it is.

 

[Whitecrow]

Man, those not being able to tell the difference between art direction and tech... geez

 

[kikkis]

I dont know how you can make fundamentally order of magnitude slower rendering paradigm super fast by the virtue of "it has dedicated hardware". Also most raytracing features have been demoed on last gen geometry loads.

 

[E-Cat]

RT doesn’t ”suck”, it does only insofar as the current gen lacks power.

PS. Path tracing is next…

 

[E-Cat]

I dont know how you can make fundamentally order of magnitude slower rendering paradigm super fast by the virtue of "it has dedicated hardware". Also most raytracing features have been demoed on last gen geometry loads.

Bc that dedicated hw is an order of magnitude faster on RT, bringing RT costs inline w/ rasterization cost per watt

 

[Vick]

Look most of those UC4 videclips look good but all of them look a several generations behind that UE5.2 demo, don't kid yourself. Nothing you showed even looks realistic or even close to real while that UE5.2 demo looked 90% photorealistic.

I mean, I would assume you live pretty far from vegetation to believe that.
To me this was the least photorealistic UE5 showcase, far less impressive, from a "photorealism" point of view, than the first UE5 Demo and playable Matrix Awakens, and the least clean and stable as well.

Technically though, I was impressed.

This is not RT lol, this is done with two spot lights. One spot light will be for the flashlight; if your engine supports light textures, this is the one you’d apply it to. The other will have a rather low intensity, and will be EXTREMELY wide. This will be your ‘fake GI’ light. Also if you notice the "bounce lighting" doesn't cast soft shadows like it would with RT. It still looks good and is effective, i was also impressed with it. Driveclub also uses the same tech for the car headlight.

I'm pretty sure that's not at all now their GI is achieved. You can see how extremely accurate and super aggressive and entirely dynamic the bounce lights can be in TLOUII thanks to the prone mechanics, you can pull off absolutely insane things. Mindblowing stuff.

Absence of indirect shadows or not, there's nothing close except for Alien: Isolation solution, which is rather similar:




You said "several generations", well, Resident Evil 4: Remake and Dead Space: Remake, both games which would benefit immensely from a similar tech, are literally several generations behind in this regard.

DS devs stated in this video to be using a GI system, and well, when actually playing the game what they had is not even closely and remotely comparable to Naughty Dog solution even in its first iteration on PS3. It's another galaxy entirely, embarassing even.

 

[Alex11]

Absence of indirect shadows or not, there's nothing close except for Alien: Isolation solution, which is rather similar:

I played this game about 3 times and didn't exactly notice this, yeah, the lightning was gorgeous and also ran fantastically maxed out on my potato pc, but does it truly have dynamic GI?

 

[Vick]

I played this game about 3 times and didn't exactly notice this, yeah, the lightning was gorgeous and also ran fantastically maxed out on my potato pc, but does it truly have dynamic GI?

Yes, it absolutely does. It's insane because everytime you use your flashlight game looks legit mindblowing, and yet batteries are so damn scarce you end up never using it anyway.

IMO, Alien: Isolation is Top 3 rasterized lighting in a game ever to this day.
I also think it's the best survival horror game ever, at least since the 128 bit era, but that's another matter.

 

[iorek21]

Is it possible that some random studio could develop a RT solution that doesn't demand that much from the hardware?

 

[kevm3]

Initially, I wasn't impressed at all with the ray tracing implementations vs. the performance hits, but it's starting to look better.

My main problem with graphics nowadays is still those doughy, doll like characters. We need much better shaders/lighting in game for human skin.

 

[Turk1993]

I mean, I would assume you live pretty far from vegetation to believe that.
To me this was the least photorealistic UE5 showcase, far less impressive, from a "photorealism" point of view, than the first UE5 Demo and playable Matrix Awakens, and the least clean and stable as well.

Technically though, I was impressed.

Thats because its harder to render a dense jungle compared to a city or a dry rocky area. This demo was far more impressive than the other 2 demo's. They literally nailed the jungle look, its the most photorealistic real time jungle. The stream was low quality unfortunally, maybe thats why it looked less stable to you.

Oh btw the past 6 months i visited Turkey, France, Switzerland and Germany, i did over 12000KM from cities to mountains to forests to rocky canyons. So i have a pretty good idea how it looks in real life .

You said "several generations", well, Resident Evil 4: Remake and Dead Space: Remake, both games which would benefit immensely from a similar tech, are literally several generations behind in this regard.

Yes you're right they are also several generations behind compared to UE5.2 demo, i never said that they looked beter so whats the point you are making . They would look much much better if they had RTGI.

I'm pretty sure that's not at all now their GI is achieved. You can see how extremely accurate and super aggressive and entirely dynamic the bounce lights can be in TLOUII thanks to the prone mechanics, you can pull off absolutely insane things. Mindblowing stuff.

DS devs stated in this video to be using a GI system, and well, when actually playing the game what they had is not even closely and remotely comparable to Naughty Dog solution even in its first iteration on PS3. It's another galaxy entirely, embarassing even.

It literally works like this, thats the reason why its for the flashlight only on some indoor scenes. The PS4 would explode if they tried real dynamic RTGI lol, and they would scream all over the articles if that was real time GI.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Yes, it absolutely does. It's insane because everytime you use your flashlight game looks legit mindblowing, and yet batteries are so damn scarce you end up never using it anyway.

IMO, Alien: Isolation is Top 3 rasterized lighting in a game ever to this day.
I also think it's the best survival horror game ever, at least since the 128 bit era, but that's another matter.

This is the one thing I hated about Alien Isolation. The game is pretty. The art is perfect. But you rarely see any of it because you're focused on hiding and sneaking.

 

[YeulEmeralda]

Is it possible that some random studio could develop a RT solution that doesn't demand that much from the hardware?

Yes it was already mentioned.

4a games: Metro Exodus enhanced edition. Putting Western triple A studios to shame.

 

[Edmund]

RT is nice to have but the performance hit is just too much imho...

I bought into the hype by building a high end pc when the rtx 2080 launched and I couldn't even run Battlefield 5 with RTX on medium at 1440p. It made my whole pc chug and even rtx on low wasn't good.

 

[The Cockatrice]

I played this game about 3 times and didn't exactly notice this, yeah, the lightning was gorgeous and also ran fantastically maxed out on my potato pc, but does it truly have dynamic GI?

Yes, it absolutely does.

Thats not GI.



Timer. Same thing with Uncharted and most games that dont use Raytracing. Nothing mindblowing, just good smoke and mirrors that have always been used in games for ages. Stop hyperbolizing shit.

 

[Satansblade]

That's a lot of typing to say you're suffering from extreme ignorance.

 

[lukilladog]

People didn’t want 3D gaming either or the internet…

None of those sliced your frame rates in half, or more.

 

[Buggy Loop]

These guys must be watching this thread

Starts at 5:57

.."and i think people don't quite understand, that once these Unreal Engine games start shipping with Lumen and all these features in action, everything's is ray traced suddenly, right? Like that's what this is and that's what we're working towards and it will ship on these consoles and it's going to blow people's minds, they just don't know it yet..."

I have PTSD right now

 

[Vick]

Thats not GI.



Timer. Same thing with Uncharted and most games that dont use Raytracing. Nothing mindblowing, just good smoke and mirrors that have always been used in games for ages. Stop hyperbolizing shit.

What the hell does that even mean? It IS GI.
If bounce lights are dynamic and entirely dependent on the players action it's GI, period, because that's what it looks like and what devs have been calling it for a decade.
Who cares about how it's achieved?

Only a literal handful of games in history used this tech successfully and recent-current gen only games don't even bother to implement it and when they do the end result is generations behind Uncharted 4.. obviously no one's hyperbolizing anything.

P.S. It's such "smoke and mirrors" both PS5 and PC versions of Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy downgraded the GI hard, and the unlocked framerate modes in Part I on PS5 show us how insanely heavy those sections really are.

 

[Buggy Loop]

Cyberpunk 2077 overdrive demo was apparently showcased to journalists. Also straight from dev explaining the importance of ray tracing.

Technology preview Release on 11th of April for everyone

Calls it a technology preview, they'll use the feedback with Nvidia to improve it.

• RTXDI takes out the budgeting of lighting and they have unlimited amount of lights casting shadow and generating in accumulation until the horizon
• We still have to support old pipelines and all hardware platforms so it's not like it's flipping the pipeline table today, but we think that it will flip the tables for the pipelines of the future dramatically and it will make it way easier to make games visually, it will make way nicer games overall and it'll make developers happier and we'll manage to actually shorten the time span needed for delivering a game because if it's quicker, if you can quickly generate the final look you're looking for, it makes the production quicker.
• This approach is definitely something we'd love to use in the future as our main approach
• Relies on RTXDI for computing all the direct illumination and we're using path tracing to compute the indirect part of the render equation
• 4000 series SER helps execute incoherent workloads like path tracing in a performant manner on the GPU (bye bye Ampere..)
• Set up geometry, set up your lights and camera, and it just works

 

[Hoddi]

None of those sliced your frame rates in half, or more.

3D did slice our frame rates in half. But then we got 3D accelerators.

The very first 3dfx card was limited to just 640x480. Two years later, the Voodoo 2 pushed it up to 800x600 and then 1024x768 became viable with Voodoo 3. We're seeing a very similar trend with today's RT accelerators where it's only now becoming viable at higher resolutions than 1080p. It just took four years instead of three.

 

[lukilladog]

3D did slice our frame rates in half. But then we got 3D accelerators.

The very first 3dfx card was limited to just 640x480. Two years later, the Voodoo 2 pushed it up to 800x600 and then 1024x768 became viable with Voodoo 3. We're seeing a very similar trend with today's RT accelerators where it's only now becoming viable at higher resolutions than 1080p. It just took four years instead of three.

Not the frame rates in 2d or pseudo 3d games, but at least we were getting legit 3d games which brought a new dimension, literally... ray tracing on the other hand, it's often hard to tell whether is doing anything or not... unless you are doing it to a game created in Java code, lol.

 

[Alex11]

Cyberpunk 2077 overdrive demo was apparently showcased to journalists. Also straight from dev explaining the importance of ray tracing.

Technology preview Release on 11th of April for everyone

Calls it a technology preview, they'll use the feedback with Nvidia to improve it.

• RTXDI takes out the budgeting of lighting and they have unlimited amount of lights casting shadow and generating in accumulation until the horizon
• We still have to support old pipelines and all hardware platforms so it's not like it's flipping the pipeline table today, but we think that it will flip the tables for the pipelines of the future dramatically and it will make it way easier to make games visually, it will make way nicer games overall and it'll make developers happier and we'll manage to actually shorten the time span needed for delivering a game because if it's quicker, if you can quickly generate the final look you're looking for, it makes the production quicker.
• This approach is definitely something we'd love to use in the future as our main approach
• Relies on RTXDI for computing all the direct illumination and we're using path tracing to compute the indirect part of the render equation
• 4000 series SER helps execute incoherent workloads like path tracing in a performant manner on the GPU (bye bye Ampere..)
• Set up geometry, set up your lights and camera, and it just works

Well, I'm sure is gonna look very pretty and whatnot, but I'm hoping they are fixing the cardboards cars in the distance, because that's just jarring.

 

[TwinB242]

People who think Ray Tracing is overrated never played Dying Light 2 with all of the RT features enabled. Probably the most natural and realistic looking lighting i've seen in a game.

 

[The Cockatrice]

What the hell does that even mean? It IS GI.
If bounce lights are dynamic and entirely dependent on the players action it's GI, period, because that's what it looks like and what devs have been calling it for a decade.
Who cares about how it's achieved?

Only a literal handful of games in history used this tech successfully and recent-current gen only games don't even bother to implement it and when they do the end result is generations behind Uncharted 4.. obviously no one's hyperbolizing anything.

P.S. It's such "smoke and mirrors" both PS5 and PC versions of Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy downgraded the GI hard, and the unlocked framerate modes in Part I on PS5 show us how insanely heavy those sections really are.

Have you even watched the video? Guess not. They are just fixed lights. Facts. Not wet dreams.

 

[Vick]

Have you even watched the video? Guess not. They are just fixed lights. Facts. Not wet dreams.

Dude..

*










These aren't "fixed lights". Every step you take, the entire environment's illumination changes according to pixel perfect position of your controlled light source. In Part I, every step AND position of your character, stand, crouch and prone, changes completely how assets and environment as a whole is lit.
Same goes for Alien: Isolation, although less refined and extensive.

1) Dynamic and accurate light bounce = dynamic GI.
2) Heaviest and most demanding portions of the games.
3) Only seen in a handful of games ever even a generation later, despite the massive upgrade in visual fidelity vs OFF.

These are facts. Not whatever the hell you were trying to say.

Is it real global illumination, whatever te hell that means since every "real GI" currently implemented in RT games is full of compromises? No one cares, result is what matters.

*TLOU video is the dumbest and most basic I could find, I'll see if I can take some myself later.

 

[sertopico]

Cyberpunk 2077 overdrive demo was apparently showcased to journalists. Also straight from dev explaining the importance of ray tracing.

Technology preview Release on 11th of April for everyone

Calls it a technology preview, they'll use the feedback with Nvidia to improve it.

• RTXDI takes out the budgeting of lighting and they have unlimited amount of lights casting shadow and generating in accumulation until the horizon
• We still have to support old pipelines and all hardware platforms so it's not like it's flipping the pipeline table today, but we think that it will flip the tables for the pipelines of the future dramatically and it will make it way easier to make games visually, it will make way nicer games overall and it'll make developers happier and we'll manage to actually shorten the time span needed for delivering a game because if it's quicker, if you can quickly generate the final look you're looking for, it makes the production quicker.
• This approach is definitely something we'd love to use in the future as our main approach
• Relies on RTXDI for computing all the direct illumination and we're using path tracing to compute the indirect part of the render equation
• 4000 series SER helps execute incoherent workloads like path tracing in a performant manner on the GPU (bye bye Ampere..)
• Set up geometry, set up your lights and camera, and it just works

nVidia is apparently keeping them on a very short leash.

 

[The Cockatrice]

Dude..

*










These aren't "fixed lights". Every step you take, the entire environment's illumination changes according to pixel perfect position of your controlled light source. In Part I, every step AND position of your character, stand, crouch and prone, changes completely how assets and environment as a whole is lit.
Same goes for Alien: Isolation, although less refined and extensive.

1) Dynamic and accurate light bounce = dynamic GI.
2) Heaviest and most demanding portions of the games.
3) Only seen in a handful of games ever even a generation later, despite the massive upgrade in visual fidelity vs OFF.

These are facts. Not whatever the hell you were trying to say.

Is it real global illumination, whatever te hell that means since every "real GI" currently implemented in RT games is full of compromises? No one cares, result is what matters.

*TLOU video is the dumbest and most basic I could find, I'll see if I can take some myself later.

My guy, DID YOU WATCH THE VIDEO? I am fucking talking about Alien Isolation. It doesnt have any GI. Light bounce is not GI lmfao.

 

[Vick]

My guy, DID YOU WATCH THE VIDEO? I am fucking talking about Alien Isolation. It doesnt have any GI. Light bounce is not GI lmfao.

No, you're talking about a static fire lights which has nothing at all to do with what I was talking about regarding flashlight and dynamic light bounce.

But whatever dude.

 

[lukilladog]

People who think Ray Tracing is overrated never played Dying Light 2 with all of the RT features enabled. Probably the most natural and realistic looking lighting i've seen in a game.

I played it with RT, it looks awful, it crushes under shadow elements. Metro enhanced wipes the floor with this... to bad that they had to go with noticeable worst texturing than the previous game, maybe because of RT.

 

[lukilladog]

nVidia is apparently keeping them on a very short leash.

This deal has to be worth at least 5-10 million for CDPR. The amount of effort they put into this (pushing Nvidia´s hardware) is diametrically opposed to their commitment to fix game elements like out of place NPC animations and the blown up camera exposure when using the car's cockpit.