Ray Tracing - Game Changer or Overhyped?

Ray Tracing - Game Changer or Overhyped?

  • Yes - Game Changer for sure

    Votes: 118 46.6%

  • No - Overhyped, not what was intended

    Votes: 135 53.4%
  • Total voters
    253
Youn said:
nah man, it's too much work getting off my fat ass to try and lay down the law...

but that's cute to suggest what we are seeing in games here is physically accurate and it's the end-all-be-all... I remember folks were saying that when mario first learned to jump, and look where we are now... oh shit, applying physics to jump mechanics turns out to be a turd, what irony...
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No need to prove my point that intense...
 
I needed it because for a moment there my epeen was shrinking...
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Based on what exactly ? Explain it to me , gaming is not going to change because of this.
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I see games changing. Picture a stealth game. You're hiding in a corner from your enemy. You can't see him directly, but you can see exactly when s/he gets close enough to that corner that you can attack silently and clear her/him. That is impossible to do now with realistic reflections - because the enemy isn't on screen. Lighting is another benefit of raytracing - it's not like night and day, more like HDR signal compared to SDR signal - you notice it, it's clearly better and more detailed, more natural. You could go back to SDR, but HDR looks instantly better. Raytracing is similar, because it works like physical light does (kinda, although inversely calculated from the eye/camera to the light source).

It will take years for RT to become great, but it's the same with each step forward. Shaders weren't amazing when they were released - I remember basically seeing some lights and materials, done. It wasn't exciting, but the prospect of what you could do with it was. Now things look great because we started with shaders. I don't think we even know yet what progress we'll make once RT becomes more complex and renderable at speed. If we never pushed the envelope, we'd still be playing 8-bit sidescrollers.
 
I agree with everything you said however:

euskalzabe said:
It will take years for RT to become great, but it's the same with each step forward..
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is exactly why I marked it as over hyped. It needs to happen, the industry needs to move forward. But it is not going to be realized for another generation or two of GPU's when all games release with it and players can utilize it. Nvidia is touting it as the end all but right now with the 2080, it just isn't. Just like PhysX in its time.
 
Ripskin said:
I agree with everything you said however:



is exactly why I marked it as over hyped. It needs to happen, the industry needs to move forward. But it is not going to be realized for another generation or two of GPU's when all games release with it and players can utilize it. Nvidia is touting it as the end all but right now with the 2080, it just isn't. Just like PhysX in its time.
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You need to differentiate between GPU-PhysX and PhysX.

PhysX is very much well and alive....GPU PhysX not so much.
 
Factum said:
You need to differentiate between GPU-PhysX and PhysX.

PhysX is very much well and alive....GPU PhysX not so much.
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I never said PhysX was not alive and well.

I merely am stating that at launch PhysX was touted as world ending, and it was not. As you said it is doing quite well but it did not release ready to rock. Ray Tracing is going to take a while to come to fruition and implementation so I stand by it being over hyped right now.
 
Dayaks said:
They could have put 50%+ more CUDA cores....

The video I posted right before your post sold me a lot more. Reflections off everything (windows, water, walls, vehicles, your gun barrel, ect.) I think will greatly increase immersion for me.
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Games like SOTR, absolutely yes! But in fast paced shooter I am not sure if one would be looking at shadows and reflections.
 
NKD said:
Games like SOTR, absolutely yes! But in fast paced shooter I am not sure if one would be looking at shadows and reflections.
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I'd say in most games a lot of the fine details are lost as soon as you are in movement. Some from motion blur due to LCD response times and refresh rates, most due to not being able to focus on anything but say enemies. A lot of games are now even designed to let you take in the grandeur of the environments using reveal cutscenes. I recently played through God of War on the PS4 and that game has an immense amount of detail everywhere from character models to the environments they adventure in but most of the time I am focusing on throwing an axe at someone's head!
 
euskalzabe said:
I see games changing. Picture a stealth game. You're hiding in a corner from your enemy. You can't see him directly, but you can see exactly when s/he gets close enough to that corner that you can attack silently and clear her/him. That is impossible to do now with realistic reflections - because the enemy isn't on screen. Lighting is another benefit of raytracing - it's not like night and day, more like HDR signal compared to SDR signal - you notice it, it's clearly better and more detailed, more natural. You could go back to SDR, but HDR looks instantly better. Raytracing is similar, because it works like physical light does (kinda, although inversely calculated from the eye/camera to the light source).

It will take years for RT to become great, but it's the same with each step forward. Shaders weren't amazing when they were released - I remember basically seeing some lights and materials, done. It wasn't exciting, but the prospect of what you could do with it was. Now things look great because we started with shaders. I don't think we even know yet what progress we'll make once RT becomes more complex and renderable at speed. If we never pushed the envelope, we'd still be playing 8-bit sidescrollers.
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You are talking about engine limitations rather then anything else if you make a game you can do this if it needs it. It does not need ray tracing to achieve the same effect.
The analogy about HDR signal and SDR signal is also not a good comparison. HDR is not a signal but is an artist induced colour map which expands upon the SDR because of the colour and or lighting but effect is done by a colouring/visual artist.

There are few dies as large as the current one from Nvidia without it using a form of HBM.
 
kasakka said:
I'd say in most games a lot of the fine details are lost as soon as you are in movement. Some from motion blur due to LCD response times and refresh rates, most due to not being able to focus on anything but say enemies.
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That says a lot about how you play games. Many of us are in no hurry to get into encounters and spend hours exploring. It takes me hours to finish a Mass Effect, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Assassin's creed... game because I spend such long time exploring the world. When you play like that, you notice all of the detail. I'm not running around just to get through the plot.

Pieter3dnow said:
You are talking about engine limitations rather then anything else if you make a game you can do this if it needs it. It does not need ray tracing to achieve the same effect. The analogy about HDR signal and SDR signal is also not a good comparison. HDR is not a signal but is an artist induced colour map which expands upon the SDR because of the colour and or lighting but effect is done by a colouring/visual artist.
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Incorrect - I'm not talking about engine limitations. I'm talking about rasterization limitations. Two very different things. Engine limitation: oh I can't render a bigger world because my engine can't handle loading that much. Rasterization limitation: I can't render that reflection because as far as I know it's not even there since it's not on screen. Those are two drastically different scenarios. You can build an engine to load more. You can't make rasterization see something it's not built to see, by definition it "is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format (shapes) and converting it into a raster image (pixels or dots)", so any other information "doesn't exist" as far as it's concerned).

As for HDR, I stand by the example. You can nitpick about it being a signal - fine, it's not - but a way to represent the color gamut. Call it what you want, but don't miss the point of my answer: it's immediately obvious on a capable display that it's a more natural and better looking representation. That's the effect you can get with raytracing vs rasterization (not that you're seeing it now, at its realtime inception, but you will in a few years when we can render more).
 
NKD said:
Games like SOTR, absolutely yes! But in fast paced shooter I am not sure if one would be looking at shadows and reflections.
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Eh... not sure I’d call BFV fast paced but I understand your point. I wonder similar things.

Problem is it’s hard to tell until you have it on your PC. Videos never do a game/feature justice it seems.
 
NKD said:
Games like SOTR, absolutely yes! But in fast paced shooter I am not sure if one would be looking at shadows and reflections.
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If that were true then why do fans of call of duty constantly complain about the age of the engine?

I don’t think you need to be consciously looking for these improvements in order to appreciate them. But over time as your expectations change you definitely notice when something is missing. There are many subtle improvements that you may think you aren’t noticing but they’re definitely there - higher poly models, soft antialiased shadows, ambient occlusion. You can feel when these things are missing without looking for them.

It seems very short sighted (heh) to think that fast paced games don’t need accurate reflections when they are a huge part of the real world.

I can guarantee that a few years from now when we play older games that don’t render our character’s reflection we will notice no matter how fast the game is.
 
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MangoSeed said:
If that were true then why do fans of call of duty constantly complain about the age of the engine?

I don’t think you need to be consciously looking for these improvements in order to appreciate them. But over time as your expectations change you definitely notice when something is missing. There are many subtle improvements that you may think you aren’t noticing but they’re definitely there - higher poly models, soft antialiased shadows, ambient occlusion. You can feel when these things are missing without looking for them.

It seems very short sighted (heh) to think that fast paced games don’t need accurate reflections when they are a huge part of the real world.

I can guarantee that a few years from now when we play older games that don’t render our character’s reflection we will notice no matter how fast the game is.
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I wasn't being short sited, and RTX really doesn't have to do anything with engine itself. It doesn't bypass the need to update the engine.
 
MangoSeed said:
I can guarantee that a few years from now when we play older games that don’t render our character’s reflection we will notice no matter how fast the game is.
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Reflection is dependant on surfaces. if your game is in a desert good luck with reflections. Unless new RTX games only takes place on mandatory reflective surfaces.

Reflective surfaces have been in plenty of games usually water, like in Divinity: Original Sin 2, eye candy nothing more nothing less.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Reflection is dependant on surfaces. if your game is in a desert good luck with reflections. Unless new RTX games only takes place on mandatory reflective surfaces.

Reflective surfaces have been in plenty of games usually water, like in Divinity: Original Sin 2, eye candy nothing more nothing less.
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What does that mean? Nearly everything a GPU renders is just eye candy. Should we just go back to flat colored polygons?
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Reflection is dependant on surfaces. if your game is in a desert good luck with reflections. Unless new RTX games only takes place on mandatory reflective surfaces.

Reflective surfaces have been in plenty of games usually water, like in Divinity: Original Sin 2, eye candy nothing more nothing less.
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Every surface is reflective. Just because you don't see a 'reflection' doesn't mean a surface isn't reflective. Light bounces, or reflects, off of everything, period. Ray-tracing is the holy grail of graphics because all in-game lighting can theoretically be handled with ray-tracing. This includes your desert setting example.

These RTX cards are ushering in the first generation of real-time ray tracing so I don't expect the games to look mind blowing just yet but at least the ball has begun to roll into the future generations.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Reflection is dependant on surfaces. if your game is in a desert good luck with reflections. Unless new RTX games only takes place on mandatory reflective surfaces.

Reflective surfaces have been in plenty of games usually water, like in Divinity: Original Sin 2, eye candy nothing more nothing less.
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In rasterized engines you cannot reflect off-screen objects FYI.
That not how it works, please go read up.
 
Pieter3dnow said:
Reflection is dependant on surfaces. if your game is in a desert good luck with reflections. Unless new RTX games only takes place on mandatory reflective surfaces.

Reflective surfaces have been in plenty of games usually water, like in Divinity: Original Sin 2, eye candy nothing more nothing less.
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You got things a little mixed up. That's how Ray Tracing works. It's also why it requires massive computational power. In normal rasterised games developers can cheat by not rendering objects that can't be seen. In Ray Tracing, you can't do that. It's tracing the path light would take through the scene you are looking at and every object in the scene affects the light. Every object, even sand in a desert, reflects or absorbs light.
 
Sonicks said:
Every surface is reflective. Just because you don't see a 'reflection' doesn't mean a surface isn't reflective. Light bounces, or reflects, off of everything, period.
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This, precisely. RT isn't just images reflected of say a metallic surface. It's light reflecting off of everything, since that's how light works. We well get %100 correct light, every time, all the time. In a few years, looking at rasterized games will feel like looking at artificially colored black & white movies.
 
euskalzabe said:
This, precisely. RT isn't just images reflected of say a metallic surface. It's light reflecting off of everything, since that's how light works. We well get %100 correct light, every time, all the time. In a few years, looking at rasterized games will feel like looking at artificially colored black & white movies.
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While the 100% correct light is mostly true for RT, its not quite true for RTX.
RTX only calculates a fraction of the light rays. The rest is calculated by AI via denoise.

Not that its a bad thing. I think hybryd rendering is a good compromise. You can do the "easy" part (models, scene setup, shading) with the rasterizer and lighting, shadows and occlusion in RT. Which is where it excels.
 
What I found disingenuous with one or two of the RTX demos I saw was it was basically "RT vs nothing at all", when there are plenty of non-RT approximations that are commonly used which, used skillfully, would massively reduce the impact of the improvements that RT can offer. Also there are plenty of situations when it really does offer no benefit, because true ray traced lighting can be done offline and baked. It's only the shiny reflections which are going to benefit any time soon. So expect developers to go overboard with shiny surfaces in the early days, as they go out of their way to make sure you notice their expensive new tech in action.

We're already well into the diminishing returns part of graphics evolution, so no one should expect a massive leap in quality. But the thing that will prevent games ever being on a par with movies is that they don't have the time and budget to produce all of the assets that are required for games at that level of quality, even if the hardware (and your internet connection) could cope with it. Look at how much it costs to make a AAA game already.
 
Sonicks said:
Every surface is reflective. Just because you don't see a 'reflection' doesn't mean a surface isn't reflective. Light bounces, or reflects, off of everything, period. <snip>
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Now just hold on there partner... What about Black holes beyond their event horizon? And then there's shit like Vantablack. (Ok, it only absorbs 99.965% of all incoming visible light, but that's pretty damn close.) I believe you need to insert a "mostly" in there somewhere just to account for Black holes and drop the period.
 
Supercharged_Z06 said:
Now just hold on there partner... What about Black holes beyond their event horizon? And then there's shit like Vantablack. (Ok, it only absorbs 99.965% of all incoming visible light, but that's pretty damn close.) I believe you need to insert a "mostly" in there somewhere just to account for Black holes and drop the period.
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I don't think black holes count as surfaces.
 
Stoly said:
I don't think black holes count as surfaces.
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Mostly reflected is accurate. Saying that "Light bounces, or reflects, off of everything, period." isn't quite correct. Black holes do exist... and a Black hole's event horizon is its "surface". Light absolutely does not reflect off of it. Ok, back on topic. RTX is a step in the right direction IMHO, but this first gen is just a baby step. Don't expect too much from it.
 
I think ray tracing is game changing. I don't think Nvidia's implementation is going to do it justice this generation. I personally think the performance trade off will be too great.

At this point, I may upgrade to a used 1080ti and then wait for for the 4080ti.
 
Litfod said:
We're already well into the diminishing returns part of graphics evolution, so no one should expect a massive leap in quality.
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Returns are diminishing yes and we’ve definitely come a long way and have picked most of the low hanging fruit but there are still some basics that we haven’t solved. Reflections, translucency, caustics, global illumination are ‘basic’ requirements for rendering and none of them exist in games today. The fakes don’t come anywhere close.

Just look at any offline path traced render to see how far we are from ‘good enough’.
 
I do wonder if the 20-series Ti was priced at $699, would people still say ray-tracing is over-hyped and not ready?
 
cybereality said:
I do wonder if the 20-series Ti was priced at $699, would people still say ray-tracing is over-hyped and not ready?
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Yes. The people that could only afford $599 or it’s not their preferred company would justify not buying it.
 
Supercharged_Z06 said:
Now just hold on there partner... What about Black holes beyond their event horizon? And then there's shit like Vantablack. (Ok, it only absorbs 99.965% of all incoming visible light, but that's pretty damn close.) I believe you need to insert a "mostly" in there somewhere just to account for Black holes and drop the period.
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Lol, I thought about bringing up that Vantablack stuff. What I should have said was "every surface is reflective to varying degrees".
 
cybereality said:
I do wonder if the 20-series Ti was priced at $699, would people still say ray-tracing is over-hyped and not ready?
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I would think yes when it takes your top end card to run the tech at 1080p at acceptable frames. However at that price most would care about the overall performance then a tacked on tech that may not be ready for prime time yet.
 
I think it will be utterly gamechanging, the single greatest advance in 20 years, when combined with high fidelity augmented reality displays.
 
Sonicks said:
Every surface is reflective. Just because you don't see a 'reflection' doesn't mean a surface isn't reflective. Light bounces, or reflects, off of everything, period. Ray-tracing is the holy grail of graphics because all in-game lighting can theoretically be handled with ray-tracing. This includes your desert setting example.

These RTX cards are ushering in the first generation of real-time ray tracing so I don't expect the games to look mind blowing just yet but at least the ball has begun to roll into the future generations.
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Yeah I can't see this working (on this hardware) when you have a racing game with every light source from headlights on each car and cars opposing traffic and street light without it grinding to a halt without limiting light sources.
MangoSeed said:
What does that mean? Nearly everything a GPU renders is just eye candy. Should we just go back to flat colored polygons?
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It means that when people complain about texture compression in a FPS game when they stand still and look at it while the game needs to run fast not pretty.
That leaves a lot to be desired for what a game engine can handle and now the limit is hardware not software.

Montu said:
Yeah, because AMD can't do it yet. /s
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There are a lot of things AMD can not do but does that mean that a new technology is worthless , I'm saying that it will not only be limited it might not be even viable to build upon with Nvidia cannibalizing shader power because of the size of the die. If you thought the price of the cards are now bad imagine the next generation where they use a lower nm process and have to use either bigger die or eat shaders, those cards would easily cost a lot more if it is 2 times the ray tracing performance.
 
euskalzabe said:
That says a lot about how you play games. Many of us are in no hurry to get into encounters and spend hours exploring. It takes me hours to finish a Mass Effect, Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Assassin's creed... game because I spend such long time exploring the world. When you play like that, you notice all of the detail. I'm not running around just to get through the plot.
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No, that's pretty much how anyone would play the game. Once the action starts you just can't admire all the detail. That doesn't mean I don't stop and do it but during most gameplay moments you are constantly moving and thus at the mercy of good ol' motion blur and image persistence. At those moments you won't be able to appreciate if a reflection is raytraced or not.
 
Gideon said:
I would think yes when it takes your top end card to run the tech at 1080p at acceptable frames. However at that price most would care about the overall performance then a tacked on tech that may not be ready for prime time yet.
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We should be careful about propagating the '1080p' thing; while it was most certainly said, we're now applying it way out of context.
  • The context starts with what would be considered an early Alpha build- even with the level of quality in that build, significant optimizations remained unimplemented, so performance at that level of quality should improve
  • The balance of ray tracing and raster lighting is itself a variable, and as developers implement controls, both they and end users may find a better balance that retains the key benefits of ray tracing while keeping performance acceptable, or perhaps even pushing it to exceptional
  • This was an example in one game only, and extrapolating it to other engines and games would be foolish at this point
 
IdiotInCharge said:
We should be careful about propagating the '1080p' thing; while it was most certainly said, we're now applying it way out of context.
  • The context starts with what would be considered an early Alpha build- even with the level of quality in that build, significant optimizations remained unimplemented, so performance at that level of quality should improve
  • The balance of ray tracing and raster lighting is itself a variable, and as developers implement controls, both they and end users may find a better balance that retains the key benefits of ray tracing while keeping performance acceptable, or perhaps even pushing it to exceptional
  • This was an example in one game only, and extrapolating it to other engines and games would be foolish at this point
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I am not counting the Tomb Raider game, Battlefield V is close to release and still is struggling. Either way it has not been painted into a positive light and the fact that Nvidia only want to show it off using a 2080ti is kind of telling as well. To me it just shows it's not ready for use yet, not that developers may at some point make it better but right now it's kind of useless, unless you plan on playing at 1080p with a 1200 dollar card. Even the Metro game coming has been running in 1080p, so yeah I think my expectations are correct but of course a year later maybe perhaps it will be better but right now it's not looking good. But rarely does a new tech work out as well as it's touted on the first gen using it.
 
Gideon said:
I am not counting the Tomb Raider game, Battlefield V is close to release and still is struggling. Either way it has not been painted into a positive light and the fact that Nvidia only want to show it off using a 2080ti is kind of telling as well. To me it just shows it's not ready for use yet, not that developers may at some point make it better but right now it's kind of useless, unless you plan on playing at 1080p with a 1200 dollar card. Even the Metro game coming has been running in 1080p, so yeah I think my expectations are correct but of course a year later maybe perhaps it will be better but right now it's not looking good. But rarely does a new tech work out as well as it's touted on the first gen using it.
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The last thing I saw on BFV was an interview with DICE and appeared they were at 40-50FPS at 1440p and could easily get 30% more out of it. Along with working on split rendering (scene at 4k and RT at lower res, ect.)

You can’t even use RT until the October DirectX update. There’s still a bit of time before it’s even possible to turn it on. You talk about the 1080p nonsense like it’s fact. Not that it matters as it seems to have zero impact on preorders.... but I am wondering if initial reviews will even feature RT.
 
Dayaks said:
The last thing I saw on BFV was an interview with DICE and appeared they were at 40-50FPS at 1440p and could easily get 30% more out of it. Along with working on split rendering (scene at 4k and RT at lower res, ect.)

You can’t even use RT until the October DirectX update. There’s still a bit of time before it’s even possible to turn it on. You talk about the 1080p nonsense like it’s fact. Not that it matters as it seems to have zero impact on preorders.... but I am wondering if initial reviews will even feature RT.
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That increase is probably from running the raytraced parts at lower than native resolution - which is probably perfectly fine because they are not used for things that need to be completely sharp in the first place. In future GPU generations we will start to see more uses for realtime raytracing but for now I think many games will stick with shadows and reflections.
 
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