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.
Comment on Anon turns on raytracing
pennomi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
We’ve gotten so good at faking most lighting effects that honestly RTX isn’t a huge win except in certain types of scenes.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Gamers needs expensive hardware so designer has less work. Game still not cheaper.
Thassodar@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
I took pickes and tomatoes off my burger, where’s my $0.23 discount damn it?!
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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 profit for their shareholders.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
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.
murvel@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
Not true. Screen space reflections consistently fails to produce accurate reflections.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
Screenspace isn’t the only way to draw reflections. 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.
murvel@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
What I’m talking about is drawing accurate reflections and I don’t know any other technique that produces the same accuracy as RT
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
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 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.
rtxn@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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).
Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
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.
adriancourreges.com/…/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.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are cases where screen space can resolve a scene perfectly. Rare cases. That also happen to break down if the user can interact with the scene in any way.
red@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
The difference is pretty big when there are lots od 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.
Klear@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.
DaTingGoBrrr@lemm.ee 3 weeks ago
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.
faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
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.
Klear@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
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.