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rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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.

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SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Don’t forget that temporal smear. I like to apply vaseline directly onto my monitor instead.

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- HereIAm@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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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AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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)

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mindbleach@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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- rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    True, even if there weren’t that windows border, you just knew windows were lurking behind the game somewhere in the shadows…
    
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    rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- Jyek@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Valmond@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    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.
    
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