Thoughts on Ray Tracing

[imsirovic5]

Was wondering what the general sentiment is towards introducing special hardware dedicated to Ray Tracing? Personally, I am excited for a push in image quality over pumping more FPS as ray tracing has always been a holy grail of graphic nerds. However, in its current implementation, its relatively weak and it will take few generations of hardware (not to mention software) for it to showcase its potential. But I am personally glad the process has finally begun.

 

[Phlorge]

Ray tracing looks amazing. However it apparently runs very poorly.


2080ti is running 30-60 fps @ 1080p with ray tracing on.


Ray tracing will be used in the future, but nobody is going to be using it in the near future.

 

[sharknice]

Maybe it runs better on games with less polygons. If it does it would work great for VR games like that.

It could also be a great way to make older games look better but would require some development so probably won't happen for most of them.

 

[Brent_Justice]

I'm all for it, but like you said it will take time to evolve in games and performance. But you have to start somewhere, someone has to get the ball rolling, and that is what I see with this launch, it's the start of something great in gaming, but, just the start. It has a long ways to go. Once it "gets there" then it will be very special, but IMO that will be a few years.

 

[Sycraft]

I'm all for it, but like you said it will take time to evolve in games and performance. But you have to start somewhere, someone has to get the ball rolling, and that is what I see with this launch, it's the start of something great in gaming, but, just the start. It has a long ways to go. Once it "gets there" then it will be very special, but IMO that will be a few years.

I feel like it'll kinda be like shaders. When the GeForce 3 first came out nothing used the programmable pixel pipeline, and then when they started to, they couldn't do much with them, if you tried to apply shaders to too many surfaces, you'd slow things down too much because they weren't powerful and there weren't that many of them on the card. So you would just have like shimmery water or something. However as time went on cards got more and more shader power, and games kept using the tech more until now basically all games are using complex materials composed of multiple layers (like a texture, specular, displacement, and shadow layer) combined with the shaders on the GPU.

Probably similar shit here. At first it'll need to be used pretty sparingly, games that go hard with it will perform too slow. However give it time, and it'll probably become widely used.

 

[polonyc2]

I want all my games to look like Pixar's Coco...

 

[cybereality]

Ray tracing is basically the holy grail of 3d graphics. A lot of the special effects in movies are using ray tracing already and they look pretty much photo real. Obviously not at real time, but it's a good direction to be moving toward.

Please watch the videos on the HardOCP article. https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/08/21/nvidia_rtx_2080_ti_unclothed/

It may be hard to see what the big deal is, because many games today can look similar but with baked (pre-rendered) lighting. The baking itself can use ray tracing and record the lighting into a texture when exporting the level. But now this can be done all in real time. This could (for example) enable deeper interactions with the world: fully destructible environments, dynamic day/night cycles, more realistic lighting and shadowing with less side-effects. Watch the Tomb Raider video in the link above and look closely at the character shadows. This has never been done before to that fidelity. The Metro video was also amazing, that whole room was lit basically with indirect light (light bouncing inside the interior). This has been faked before, and they were good fakes, but this is a whole new level.

So I'm really excited and think this can be the beginning of something really big for the future of PC gaming in particular. Can't imagine consoles getting this any time soon, so it will be a good reason to spend money on a PC if you like spending money on computer parts and need an excuse.

 

[oldmanbal]

People still look like plastic dolls ingame. I can see this tech being a nice me too feature on casual gaming titles with less frame rate demand like rpgs in the next 2-3 years. Meanwhile just toss it in the bin with physx, soft shadows, txaa, and other frame crushing negligible visual benefit gimmicks. Dont get me wrong, its nice to have shiny benchmarks, but the tech isnt there yet and we all know how prohibitively slow game developers are in integrating technology that isnt a concole first hardware feature.

 

[Armenius]

People still look like plastic dolls ingame. I can see this tech being a nice me too feature on casual gaming titles with less frame rate demand like rpgs in the next 2-3 years. Meanwhile just toss it in the bin with physx, soft shadows, txaa, and other frame crushing negligible visual benefit gimmicks. Dont get me wrong, its nice to have shiny benchmarks, but the tech isnt there yet and we all know how prohibitively slow game developers are in integrating technology that isnt a concole first hardware feature.

Ray tracing is no gimmick, and the effect is not negligible. The detail of models is still up to the artists, and the realism of the lighting with ray tracing is still dependent on how well the surface properties of the environment are defined. Ray tracing means the death of all the fake lighting effects developed in the past 20 years that take a lot of time to design and bake. Perhaps when ray tracing takes over more time can be spent making people look less plastic.

 

[oldmanbal]

Ray tracing is no gimmick, and the effect is not negligible. The detail of models is still up to the artists, and the realism of the lighting with ray tracing is still dependent on how well the surface properties of the environment are defined. Ray tracing means the death of all the fake lighting effects developed in the past 20 years that take a lot of time to design and bake. Perhaps when ray tracing takes over more time can be spent making people look less plastic.

I'm not discounting that Ray tracing has a bright future ahead of it, and I agree that this seems to be the logical direction for the evolution of realistic gaming. However since we only live in the present and the current implementation of Ray tracing is virtually non-existent for gamers today, I can't get on board with the justification of a price increase at this time.

 

[exlink]

However since we only live in the present and the current implementation of Ray tracing is virtually non-existent for gamers today, I can't get on board with the justification of a price increase at this time.

It's virtually non-existent because we haven't had the hardware to effectively support it. The RTX series is the first generation of cards that will support it to a degree. You have to start somewhere and more often than not you pay an early adopter fee to be the first to experience new tech - regardless of the industry.

 

[imsirovic5]

Extreme tech just published article using some of the analysis from this website. It echoes a lot of comments from here, interesting read.

 

[Armenius]

I'm not discounting that Ray tracing has a bright future ahead of it, and I agree that this seems to be the logical direction for the evolution of realistic gaming. However since we only live in the present and the current implementation of Ray tracing is virtually non-existent for gamers today, I can't get on board with the justification of a price increase at this time.

Fair enough. Us suckers who preordered the RTX cards are the ones who will show there is a market for the tech, though, and we'll be subsidizing the trickle down to middle- and low-end hardware in the future.

 

[Hornet]

I feel like it'll kinda be like shaders. When the GeForce 3 first came out nothing used the programmable pixel pipeline, and then when they started to, they couldn't do much with them, if you tried to apply shaders to too many surfaces, you'd slow things down too much because they weren't powerful and there weren't that many of them on the card. So you would just have like shimmery water or something. However as time went on cards got more and more shader power, and games kept using the tech more until now basically all games are using complex materials composed of multiple layers (like a texture, specular, displacement, and shadow layer) combined with the shaders on the GPU.

Probably similar shit here. At first it'll need to be used pretty sparingly, games that go hard with it will perform too slow. However give it time, and it'll probably become widely used.

I agree with this. It will need time to take off the same way programmable shaders did, but I think the industry will eventually adopt it.

And I hope that is the case. As I feel recent advancement have been kind of stagnant, with most focus revolving around VR and 4k HDR display, but nothing that takes real time graphics to the next step in terms of realism.

 

[Armenius]

I agree with this. It will need time to take off the same way programmable shaders did, but I think the industry will eventually adopt it.

And I hope that is the case. As I feel recent advancement have been kind of stagnant, with most focus revolving around VR and 4k HDR display, but nothing that takes real time graphics to the next step in terms of realism.

I also think ray tracing will greatly improve HDR and maybe even make it easier to implement, so hopefully we'll see more HDR support for PC games in the future.

 

[vegeta535]

Great tech but I don't think it is ready yet. It will take til the 4xxx serise before it is truely ready. The performance hit is too much to use at anything above 1080P.

 

[Gideon]

Were not at the point where we have the horsepower to handle ray tracing yet. Right now it's more gimmick then something useful. That might change in a generation or two but most will disable it since they wont like the fps hit they take with it on.

 

[Dayaks]

Jesus christ we don’t even have benchmarks or a released card yet, how do you guys say something is too much of a hit!?

 

[Phlorge]

Great tech but I don't think it is ready yet. It will take til the 4xxx serise before it is truely ready. The performance hit is too much to use at anything above 1080P.

Its way too early to say that definitively. We have an offscreen video and some reports saying it cant hit 60 with it on. OK. But lets wait and see.

Were not at the point where we have the horsepower to handle ray tracing yet. Right now it's more gimmick then something useful. That might change in a generation or two but most will disable it since they wont like the fps hit they take with it on.

I can only face palm so much in one day.

 

[exlink]

Jesus christ we don’t even have benchmarks or a released card yet, how do you guys say something is too much of a hit!?

Apparently people think it's useful to "determine" the performance of hardware by entirely basing it on a single, pre-release build of a game utilizing pre-release drivers. Ray tracing won't even be in the launch build of Tomb Raider; it is being patched in later. Just wait for the actual benchmarks...

The number of times I've seen this example brought up on this forum alone is ridiculous - it's in almost every single RTX thread. We get it, we've seen it, and we're still waiting for the official benchmarks from reviews.

 

[Dayaks]

Apparently people think it's useful to "determine" the performance of hardware by entirely basing it on a single, pre-release build of a game utilizing pre-release drivers. Ray tracing won't even be in the launch build of Tomb Raider; it is being patched in later. Just wait for the actual benchmarks...

The number of times I've seen this example brought up on this forum alone is ridiculous - it's in almost every single RTX thread. We get it, we've seen it, and we're still waiting for the official benchmarks from reviews.

There’s also this from the mouth of the horse. How many times have we seen performance jump massively after a release without a brand new tech!? Just google some alpha benchmarks from games.

 

[pendragon1]