We’ve gotten so good at faking most lighting effects that honestly RTX isn’t a huge win except in certain types of scenes.
Anon turns on raytracing
Submitted 17 hours ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/9a1de05c-6253-4949-acb6-689cabddce1b.jpeg
Comments
pennomi@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
count_dongulus@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
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.
Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 hours ago
Gamers needs expensive hardware so designer has less work. Game still not cheaper.
red@sopuli.xyz 13 hours 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 10 hours 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.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 13 hours 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 13 hours ago
Not true. Screen space reflections consistently fails to produce accurate reflections.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 12 hours 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.
rumba@lemmy.zip 7 hours 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.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 50 minutes 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)
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 5 hours ago
Don’t forget that temporal smear. I like to apply vaseline directly onto my monitor instead.
HereIAm@lemmy.world 1 hour 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
gerowen@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Skyrim has “ray traced” shadows in certain places and works great. I was in a cave once and hiding behind a cliff. An enemy was wandering around the next room and I was able to use the shadow cast on him by a torch to observe his movements without having his actual body in my field of view.
All this modern RT nonsense does is make things look slightly better than screen space reflections and tank performance.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 57 minutes ago
I would expect that to be a normal rasterized shadow map unless you can find any sources explicitly saying otherwise. Because even 1 ray per pixel in complex triangulated geometry wasn’t really practical in real time until probably at least 2018
ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
That’s actually one specific torch!
Jumi@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
It is unknown why it has this function, or why Bethesda left it in
Just Bethesda things
gerowen@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I’ve seen the effect in other places, though I guess technically they can stick that torch wherever they want as you explore.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Since you can achieve that effect with inly a few rays traced instead of hundreds used for sift shadows.
Unity & co. have no tools to automatically create such reflections?
brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
I think raytracing is fine for games that want a lot of realism. But I’m playing games with monsters and fantasy. My suspension of disbelief isn’t going to break because reflections aren’t quite right.
But I’m pretty much in the camp of, I want my games to look and feel like games. I like visual cues like highlighting items I can interact with or pick up. So lighting is always non-realistic.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 39 minutes ago
Look at Tiny Glade, it’s a great example of what raytracing can bring to a stylized game. (They did use their own raytracing pipeline different from the usual - in their own words, re-stir was overkill for what their game needed). Or like 95% of animated films. Including Arcane but excluding Stray.
semperverus@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
Yes, cool. But annoying after the first minute.
58008@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I never turn it on, the visual difference is too unimportant to warrant such a huge cost in hardware resources (and temperature). It looks different if you have side-by-side screenshots, or if you turn it off and on in-game, but if the difference is several orders of magnitude too slight to be worth it. Higher frames-per-second is more important than realistically-simulated light beams. You can’t really have both in large AAA games.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.
Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse:
TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip 12 hours ago
Raytracing is cool, personaly I feel like the state that consumers first got it in was atrocious, but it is cool. What I worry about is the ai upscale, fake frame bullshit. While it’s cool that the technology exists; like sweet, my GPU can render this game at a lower resolution, then upscale it back at a far better frame rate than without upscaling, ideally stretching out my GPU purchase. But I feel like games (in the AAA scene at least) are so unoptimized now, you NEED all of these upscaling, fake frame tricks. I’m not a Dev, I don’t know shit about making games, just my 2 cents.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 28 minutes ago
Optimization is usually possible, but it is easier said than done. Often sacrifices have to be made, but maybe it is still a better value per frame time. Sometimes there’s more that can be done, sometimes it really is just that hard to light and render that scene.
It’s hard to make any sweeping statements, but I will say that none of that potential optimization is going to happen without actually hiring graphics devs. Which costs money. And you know what corporations like to do when anything they don’t consider important costs money. So that’s probably a factor a lot of the time.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
The joke is, LCD smear anyway on low framerates.
Baggie@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
No you’ve pretty much hit it on the head there. The higher ups want it shipped yesterday, if you can ship it without fixing those performance issues they’re likely going to make you do that.
NoForwardslashS@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
Raytracing will be cool if hardware can catch it up. It’s pretty pointless if you have to play upscaled to turn the graphics up. And as you say, upscaling has its uses and is great tech, but when a game needs it to not look like dogshit (looking at you Stalker 2) it worries me a lot.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 23 minutes ago
I feel like if you have the level of a 3070 or above at 1080p, pathtracing, even with the upscaling you need, can be an option. At least based on my experience with portal rtx.
Personally I have a 3060, but (in the one other game I actually have played on it with raytracing support) I still turned on raytraced shadows in Halo Infinite because I couldn’t really notice a difference in responsiveness. There definitely was one (I have a 144hz monitor) but I just couldn’t notice it.
murvel@feddit.nu 13 hours ago
It’s not a trick, it’s just lighting done the way it should be done without all the tricks we need now like Subsurface scattering or Screen space reflections.
The added benefit is that materials reflect more of their natural reflection making all the materials look more true to life.
Its main drawback is that it’s GPU costly, but more and more AAA games are now moving toward RT as standard by being more clever in how it handles its calculations.
rtxn@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yes, I’m sure every player spends the majority of their game time admiring the realistic material properties of Spider-Man’s suit. So far I’ve never seen a game that was made better by forcing RT into it. A little prettier if you really focus on the details where it works, but overall it’s a costly (in terms of power, computation, and price) gimmick.
itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
The one benefit I see is that it simplifies lighting for the developer by a whole lot.
Which isn’t a benefit at all, because as of now, they basically have to have a non-raytrace version so 90% of players can play the game
But in a decade, maybe, raytracing will make sense as the default
murvel@feddit.nu 12 hours ago
RT also makes level-design simpler for the development team as they can design levels by what-you-see-is-what-you-get method rather than having to bake the light sources.
KoboldOfArtifice@ttrpg.network 11 hours ago
Where is RTX being forced into? Haven’t seen a game where it’s not an option you have to toggle on first and it’s not like RTX is a lot of additional work for the developer, seeing how it in fact reduces the work necessary to make a scene look the way it should.
Yes, it’s stupidly expensive and not every game manages to benefit massively from it, but it can lead to some very pretty environments in games and it seems perfectly valid in those cases.
Also, some people do quite enjoy admiring the way the materials of various things end up looking. Maybe it’s not the majority of players, but some people quite like looking at details in the games they play.
Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 11 hours ago
Subsurface scattering is not one of the things you get automatically with ray tracing. If you just bounce they rays off objects as the usual first step you don’t get any light penetration into the object, so none of that depth.
Maybe you meant ambient occlusion?
SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 5 hours ago
This. Personally I think you can’t really expect gamers to know all of that. The only reason I know this particular fact is cause I’m using Blender. It’s a bit paradox, but really just pointless to talk about the technical details of games with gamers.
Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
Games visuals are riddled with shortcuts and simplification.
You don’t think the way the water moves when your characters steps on a puddle, the smoke rises from fires or the damage on the walls are Physics Simulations, do you?!
It’s all a variation o procedural noise such as Perkin Noise, particle effects to at best (for example, ocean simulation) some formulas that turn out to look good enough.
(Want to see Physics Simulations in 3D generated worlds, look at Special Effects in Films).
Improving one element of game space visual fidelity - reflections - is nice but it’s unclear that it’s worth its downsides (more expensive hardware, slower performance) given how everything else is still one big pile of “good enough” shortcuts.
murvel@feddit.nu 9 hours ago
RT is of course a shortcut too, it’s not an exact representation of how light actually behaves…
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 13 hours ago
raytracing still needs to do subsurface scattering. It can actually do it for real though. It also “wastes” a lot of bounces, so is usually approximated anyway
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Even with raytracing there is still a lot of shortcuts and trickery under the hood. Ray tracing is the “cheating” form of path tracing.
hazl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 hours ago
Maximise your RTX performance with this one crazy hack!
Ray traced reflections: on
Ray traced everything else: offBlackmist@feddit.uk 12 hours ago
I’d argue reflections are nowhere near as nice looking as RTGI. If anything, switch reflections off.
hazl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
But muh puddles! Night City is nothing without those gorgeous, mirror–like puddles.
frezik@midwest.social 9 hours ago
The best examples of raytracing are in applying it to old games, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft.
Newer games were already hitting diminishing returns on photo realism. Adding ray tracing takes them from 95% photo realistic to 96%.
MurrayL@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I disagree - adding RT to games that weren’t designed for it often (but not always) wrecks the original art direction.
Quake II is a great example; I think the raytraced version looks like absolute ass. Sure, it has fancy shadows and reflections, but all that does is highlight how old the assets are.
Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Portal with ray tracing is a really cool demo, and Ive used it on the past to show off ray tracing. But man its just not as pretty as the old portal because it lacks the charm, its like those nature photos that are blown out with HDR
squaresinger@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Same with Minecraft. Minecraft looks like crap, and improving the lighting, shadows and so on just shows that off even more.
Minecraft is a game that’s deliberately not about the looks.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 4 hours ago
often (but not always) wrecks the original art direction.
Which is sometimes a nice benefit. Not to talk about the “layer” in a specific color that suddenly goes away if you enable levelsplus in Reshade. The most extreme example i’ve seen was Elex 1.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 11 hours ago
Early 3D graphic rendering was all ray-tracing, but when video games started doing textured surfaces the developers quickly realised they could just fake it with alpha as long as the light sources were static.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 14 minutes ago
Unless you consider wireframe graphics. Idk when triangle rasterization first started being used, but it’s more conceptually similar to wireframe graphics the ray tracing. Also, I don’t really know what you mean by ‘fake it with alpha’.
latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 hours ago
The first F.E.A.R. had excellent dynamic lighting, I’d argue it had the epitome of relevant dynamic lighting. It didn’t need to set your GPU on fire for it, it didn’t have to sacrifice two thirds of its framerate for it, it had it all figured out. It did need work on textures, but even those looked at least believable due to the lighting system. We really didn’t need more than that.
RT is nothing but eye candy and a pointless resource hog meant to sell us GPUs with redundant compute capacities, which don’t even guarantee that the game’ll run any better!
Upgraded from a 3060 to a 4080 Super to play STALKER 2 at more than 25 frames per second. Got the GPU, same basic settings, increased the resolution a bit, +10 FPS… Totes worth the money…
KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 hours ago
F. E. A. R. And Riddick EFBB were beautiful games, I remember GTA SA coming out a few months later and thinking, WTF are these graphics.
latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
Seriously, even GTA III had a MUCH better defined atmosphere and feel than SA!
And the Riddick games were, indeed, gorgeous! In a grim as hell way, but gorgeous!
daellat@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Cpu % usage is not a great stat. If on a 10 core CPU the main thread is maxed and the others are on 20% it would read 28% overall but you’re still CPU limited.
Even the 7800x3d is cpu limited in stalker 2 in any npc area
latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 hours ago
Sorry, yeah, forgot the deets. 9700k, none of the cores were overworked, 60% seemed to be average usage across them.
And, yeah, checked in NPC-heavy areas, where the stuttering, lag, and frame times were the worst, and I didn’t have it set to “Ridiculous” - using a combination of High for textures and Med for effects (like shadows and lighting), running it at 1080p on the 3060 and 1440p on the 4080 Super (bumped it up to native, basically).
faintwhenfree@lemmus.org 12 hours ago
I remeber reading the real sell to developers is less calculations, currently textures have to be designed for different lightening, which would require pre rendering same textures across multiple lightings. And that is time and resource intensive for developers.
Ray tracing is a simpler solution. I’m not an expert, but that seemed sensible to me.
latenightnoir@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
Honestly, this wouldn’t have been an issue, ever, if we wouldn’t have switched to “release fast, fuck quality, crunch ya’ plebs!” It’s yet another solution for a self-generated problem.
lorty@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
But you NEED the green and expensive GPU, otherwise you are missing out!!!
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 10 hours ago
But maybe finally games will get working mirror’s again.
amotio@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I have seen FEW games that really benefit from RT. RT is a subtle effect because we’we got pretty good at baking and faking how light should look.
But even if its just a subtle effect, it adds so much, the feeling of the lighting is (for me) better wit RT, light properly propagates, bounces, dynamic geometry is properly lit. It’s just so much of these, on the bigger scale, tiny upgrades that make the lighting look a lot better.
It just sucks that the performance is utter shit right now. I hope in few years this will be optimised and we won’t need to sacrifice 1\2 of the framerate just to get lighting that feels right.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
But you can bake additive environment lighting as well.
You can even bake additive lighting in layers, at least for things like street lamps, like coming out of a window onto a street, mostly static objects that can be turned on/off or broken…
And then just only use truly dynamic lighting for… people with lamps, flashlights, cars, truly dynamic stuff.
But that takes time, attention to detail, good map/level design, a bit of extra logic to handle everything… and the AAA paradigm is crank out flashy bullshit that runs like ass… unless you check out our marketing partner’s newest GPU!
Not everything, but most advanced dynamic lighting stuff that people associate with RT… can be done in an optimized way, leaving only a few elements to be truly fully, dynamically, brute force rendered every scene.
But, its about 95% easier for a game dev to (or management to tell them to) just let the game engine they paid for a liscense to (almost always UE) to handle it via assuming the end user has a GPU that costs as much as an entire PC 2 years ago.
Long, long gone are the days where game studios were largely defined by having their own engine, tailored to work optimally with the kinds of games they make.
Nearly no AAA game studios bother to make engines these days, nearly none of them have competent enough coders to actually make one… thats all subcontracted out now.
vrojak@feddit.org 13 hours ago
What games do you know that really benefit from RT? So far I’m only aware of Metro Exodus enhanced edition and probably Cyberpunk (haven’t played it yet though). Witcher 3 has some noticable changes sometimes but eh. In every other game it feels completely useless.
Nythos@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
It was quite nice in Elden Ring with the glow of the Erdtree
Senal@programming.dev 10 hours ago
The game from the screenshot, Alan Wake 2.
Also Control by the same company, but to a lesser degree.
The change is generally more subtle than people expect but it adds to the overall atmosphere, which is important for these games.
bitwolf@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
The Finals uses rxgti and the only difference between raytracing off and on is the speed at which the lighting changes within a scene.
I see little benefit from raytracing in many games. And would prefer the implementation be used in other games.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 18 minutes ago
I haven’t played the finals myself but as of the pre-release version when I watched a video about it lighting didn’t update at all without raytracing enabled. It is pretty hard to get any sort of dynamic lighting without raytracing. If not impossible, depending on how you define raytracing. But basically if they have a dynamic lighting feature that works without ‘raytracing’ they have to create a whole other GI system using world-space probes and maybe even dynamically voxeliIng the entire scene. Neither of which are easy on performance, but usually not as bad as normal hardware RT and restir. Neither of those are good at reflections or fine detail, which is why games that want to look better than that usually switch to doing it the normal way.
M137@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I always try it both on and off for a while and see if that specific game gets nicer enough to where it’s worth having on. About a third of the games I’ve played with RTX looked better enough to keep it on. Some that really blew my mind all the way through with RTX on were Ghostwire: Tokyo, Cyberpunk 2077, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws.
the_q@lemmy.zip 12 minutes ago
Ray tracing is just a way for nvidia to proprietize a technology then force the industry to use it all to keep Jensen in leather jackets. Don’t buy his cards; he has too many leather jackets!