PowerVR demo real time ray tracing graphics at 1280 × 720, 30fps.

[Seanspeed]

Nvidia/AMD gpus are able to run games way faster that look significantly better than Fallout 4, yet Fallout 4 runs like crap and looks like ass... designers. They put in just horrible textures, with ray traced lighting, those textures still look like ass. The general design of the world is quite good which saves it, but the lacking graphical quality is there for all to see. They even tacked on an attempt at god rays. Had that been done by ray tracing and had it been done with perfect performance, the game wouldn't look much different as it's the textures that are the problem. Arguable if god rays are 'better' lighting (in regards to Fallout 4 specifically, the implementation is poor) or not, but they don't make the textures look better.

Ray tracing has since the early 90s been held up as a bullet to end all graphical issues in gaming, to bring us real world looking games and is completely unmatched. Despite the fact that absolutely none of that is true, this belief has stuck around. Ray tracing is not the silver bullet to bring gaming to photo realism and the performance still isn't there at all. The PC ecosystem is still no where near mobile and the ability to just switch over half a gpu to ray tracing won't work well. It will happen akin to tessellation, very small unit added on a new process with minimal ray tracing added in a very few games then step by step move towards Nvidia ******* everyone with crappy overdone implementations

Dont completely agree with this.

You used Fallout 4 as an example, and I'd say that's one where the lighting improvements over previous Bethesda games truly has given it a next-gen sheen that elevates it above those other games. It still has weak aspects and sure, great lighting and reflections and whatnot on their own dont automatically equal a fantastic looking game, but they are a very important part of it. Lighting in general has been on one of the biggest improvements seen with the introduction of the next-gen consoles. It goes a long way in making things look either more real or simply more spectacular.

Agree with the rest of your post that some people are kind of missing the point. Real time ray tracing *is* possible right now(as mentioned, Crytek are doing it and we even have examples like The Tomorrow Children on the PS4 doing it), but dedicated hardware makes it so much more efficient.

 

[humbug]

I also get the impression there is a lack of understanding and / or appreciation.

The visual differences are subtle, well not that subtle but it seems subtle enough to make some people go "Meh"
What are you expecting to see?

Tracing light and colour stream projected onto surround objects in a 3D environment is a big deal, the effect is subtle because such things are subtle, in the real world a green bush will reflect off a white wall in certain light conditions, that is subtle, to a much greater extent a tree line or the sky will reflect off water surfaces much more clearly, or glossy car pain, a polished floor....

If you were to be shown a scene bathed in Voxel GI you might say "well what am i looking at?" its not mediately obvious that the lighting in that scene is more vibrant, complex and IRL accurate than without Voxel GI. its only when you get used to a scene with lighting like that you would miss it when its not there, your reaction when its suddenly removed after a while is you would feel like you were in an environment that's much older tech, it would appear flat and basic.

 

[Gregster]

Its a Mobile Chip for crying out loud its really not bad at all.

Not sure how much you know about mobile but pretty much every pad and phone in my house is 2560x1440 res. Hence why I mentioned limitations.

 

[humbug]

Not sure how much you know about mobile but pretty much every pad and phone in my house is 2560x1440 res. Hence why I mentioned limitations.

Not rendering high quality 3D environments on the fly they don't.

Candy-Crush, maybe...

 

[Gregster]

Not rendering high quality 3D environments on the fly they don't.

Candy-Crush, maybe...

Ok

 

[humbug]

Ok

Exactly....

Wrong forum for this, Pottsey.

 

[Pottsey]

If they demoed it with a camera that could be controlled (rather than the static camera or the on-rails cameras in the videos above), then I think the demo would be more impressive and would grab more attention. As it is it doesn't look any different to a 3D Studio Max rendering.

I cannot speak for the others demos as all I have seen is the poor quality phone videos. But the city demo is fully interactive and can be controlled.

no point, looking at the demo's nvidia (and AMD) can already do stuff that whilst it might not be 100% true raytracing, is just as visualy impressive

nvidia have real time ray tracing demos going back to 2011-2012

The difference is going by the last demos I watched from NVidia and AMD is they used a super computer style setup with a chain of very expensive top end cards. This demo by PowerVR was 1 low end mobile class GPU. The PowerVR specs are so low they can scale right down and fit into a tablet that’s what’s impressive. Unless I missed it NV and AMD have not managed to pull this off in one top end desktop GPU while PowerVR just pulled it off in a mobile class GPU running in a desktop card interface. Don't you find it visually impressive that a low end PowerVR card is matching if not beating the visual's of a high end NV Titan's doing ray tracing?

“1280x720@30fps makes it pointless for gaming, and that is running x4 of these, even if they used x1 as a coprocessor it's not going to be able to keep up with a modern GPU“

You misunderstood the article it wasn't 4 cards for 1280x720@30fps as it was 1 card. It’s not pointless for gaming. It’s really good for gaming as we get

• Improves the quality of lights and shadows.
• Renders light and shadows twice as fast as other methods with improved quality.
• Reduces memory bandwidth usage and memory for lights and shadows by approx. 50%.
• Removes the shadow artifacts PC games often suffer from.

Not sure how much you know about mobile but pretty much every pad and phone in my house is 2560x1440 res. Hence why I mentioned limitations.

What you can do is render a hybrid game with just the lights and shadows ray traced at 2560x1440 that way you end up with improved lights and shadows with a speed increased and use up less memory and bandwidth. There isn't enough raw power for a full ray traced game at 2560x1440 the goal is a hybrid engine for this 3rd generation chip.

Exactly....
Wrong forum for this, Pottsey.

How so? This is the 3rd gen PC graphics card. This is the graphic card section isn't it?

 

[humbug]

How so? This is the 3rd gen PC graphics card. This is the graphic card section isn't it?

Thats not what i meant, i think the implications of this little chip's ability to 3D Render and Ray Trace would be more appreciated on a developers forum.

Having said that this forum does have several members knowledgeable in that field.

 

[Pottsey]

Thats not what i meant, i think the implications of this little chip's ability to 3D Render and Ray Trace would be more appreciated on a developers forum.

Having said that this forum does have several members knowledgeable in that field.

Ok I see you point and agree as it is more of a developer card. The reason I posted it here is I find real time ray tracing the most exciting thing to happen in graphics cards for years.

 

[humbug]

Ok I see you point and agree as it is more of a developer card. The reason I posted it here is I find real time ray tracing the most exciting thing to happen in graphics cards for years.

Oh i agree, i'm really excited about it, Game development is really coming a long way in lots of different ways after years of stagnation, i want to share the news and even demonstrate it to everyone who will benefit from it but thats more difficult in some types of forums than others.

If you have to explain to someone what it is they are looking at you have already lost them.

 

[Pottsey]

Oh i agree, i'm really excited about it, Game development is really coming a long way in lots of different ways after years of stagnation, i want to share the news and even demonstrate it to everyone who will benefit from it but thats more difficult in some types of forums than others.

If you have to explain to someone what it is they are looking at you have already lost them.

Speaking of which one of the great things about this is it lowers game development costs and speeds up development. Smaller teams can do more for less. Developers no longer need to spend ages faking shadows and lights.

 

[queamin]

Speaking of which one of the great things about this is it lowers game development costs and speeds up development. Smaller teams can do more for less. Developers no longer need to spend ages faking shadows and lights.

This for me is what I am looking forward too.

 

[humbug]

Speaking of which one of the great things about this is it lowers game development costs and speeds up development. Smaller teams can do more for less. Developers no longer need to spend ages faking shadows and lights.

Otherwise known as baking, have you ever dabbled with CryEngine?

You can get a free one here its very old one (Crysis3 old) and it doesn't have any of the new exciting things.... but you'd be very surprised at what it can do.

 

[Pottsey]

Otherwise known as baking, have you ever dabbled with CryEngine?

You can get a free one here its very old one (Crysis3 old) and it doesn't have any of the new exciting things.... but you'd be very surprised at what it can do.

A little back in the first version all those years ago. Not sure how long its been but its in muti years since I dabbled in game maps/levels. I prefer to mess around with static rendered scenes which I have been doing on and off since the Atari ST when it took days to render a 320 x 200 16bit colour ray tracing imagine. It’s something I dabble in every so often but I am nowhere near pro level.

 

[andybird123]

.
The difference is going by the last demos I watched from NVidia and AMD is they used a super computer style setup with a chain of very expensive top end cards. This demo by PowerVR was 1 low end mobile class GPU. The PowerVR specs are so low they can scale right down and fit into a tablet that’s what’s impressive. Unless I missed it NV and AMD have not managed to pull this off in one top end desktop GPU while PowerVR just pulled it off in a mobile class GPU running in a desktop card interface. Don't you find it visually impressive that a low end PowerVR card is matching if not beating the visual's of a high end NV Titan's doing ray tracing?

the 2012 GTC demo was run on a single GTX690 and looked much better than this demo, and they could move the camera live instead of doing canned demos like this one

the article says "PC that was used in this demo, also that is equipped with four of the GR6500 card."

 

[Orangey]

I wonder have they tried running the RT builds of ETQW etc on these?

 

[Pottsey]

“the 2012 GTC demo was run on a single GTX690 and looked much better than this demo, and they could move the camera live instead of doing canned demos like this one”?

First off the demo was not a single GT690, as far as I can tell it was 1 GPU for graphics and a bunch of other GPU’s in SLI for GPU compute to do ray tracing.

2nd it’s the other way around the 2012 NV demo was canned and not live while the PowerVR demo was live at least as far as I recall the NV demo was a pre-recorded video. The NV demo was done on a super computer setup with a basic scene. 3 simple plain objects, low polygon count, no shadows, none interactive as it was pre-recorded on rails, 1 light source.

The PowerVR demos are on the opposite end of the spectrum one demo was a scene made up of 3 billion polygons with shadows. 2 fully rendered cars both internal and external next to a fully rendered fountain. How many polygons do you think it took to make those 3 simple objects in NV’s demo? I bet 1 car alone in the PVR demo was vastly more then the entire NV demo.

The other PowerVR demo was a typical game map of a section of a city you could move around the blocks, inside the buildings, fully interactive camera, live, not done on a super computer, multiply light source & shadows the rooms had walls and lots of objects.
I just don’t get how anyone could say that simple basic NV demo looks better.


EDIT: I know the camera recording this isn’t the best quality. But I have seen this demo before it’s an entire city block. Its fully controllable and you can even go inside the Diner. Far more impressive then anything NV has done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE5bpQgpKQA

“the article says "PC that was used in this demo, also that is equipped with four of the GR6500 card."”

To be fair it is badly translated. There are multiple demos some ran on 1 GR6500 card some ran on 4 CR6500 card setup. On lunch break right now so not got time to dig though the demo specs and explain more. Some of the demos are Hybrid some are full RT.

I wonder have they tried running the RT builds of ETQW etc on these?

Was that the Quake RT game version? If so I don't think they have access to that. It belongs to someone else and I believe that version of the game predates the OpenRT API so it wouldn't recognize the hardware without a recode.

 

[drunkenmaster]

I also get the impression there is a lack of understanding and / or appreciation.

The visual differences are subtle, well not that subtle but it seems subtle enough to make some people go "Meh"
What are you expecting to see?

Tracing light and colour stream projected onto surround objects in a 3D environment is a big deal, the effect is subtle because such things are subtle, in the real world a green bush will reflect off a white wall in certain light conditions, that is subtle, to a much greater extent a tree line or the sky will reflect off water surfaces much more clearly, or glossy car pain, a polished floor....

If you were to be shown a scene bathed in Voxel GI you might say "well what am i looking at?" its not mediately obvious that the lighting in that scene is more vibrant, complex and IRL accurate than without Voxel GI. its only when you get used to a scene with lighting like that you would miss it when its not there, your reaction when its suddenly removed after a while is you would feel like you were in an environment that's much older tech, it would appear flat and basic.

That is the point, back in the early 90s when there was so much "zomg ray tracing" hype it was precisely because it wasn't subtle. The current graphics vs pictures of scenes rendered in ray tracing was entirely NOT subtle because those games had terrible lighting. People thought you know, CGI level ray traced scenes vs Fade to Black type graphics and wet themselves over the idea of playing games that looked that much better than games of the time. That idea still persists and the way Pottsey talks about ray tracing in games is as if the difference will be playing Super Mario Bros vs playing a game version of Terminator 2.

If you could magically make ray tracing in real time for games work in 95, it would be a massive difference but so would using current rendering methods playing Crysis compared to those games.

Today ray tracing isn't some magic bullet that will bring us photorealistic games over night, the differences will be subtle, where games without it but with better artwork/design will look better than less good games using poor design but lighting via ray tracing.

 

[Shiari]

I'm impressed. Nope, it's not going to revolutionise desktop gaming today or even in the near future, but real time ray tracing has never been affordable before ... and this may very well change that in the coming years. To get photo-realistic imagery without faking almost everything you do need proper ray tracing.

 

[arc@css]

I like the car video.