Poll: Ray Tracing - Do we care?

[Pottsey]

All its going to mean is that we can turn the option on (if we have an rtx enabled card) and see the fps tank.

Certain effects not only look better with Ray Tracing but run faster and put less pressure on the graphics card. Things like Shadows, Reflections, Refractions are all better done via Ray tracing.
Full Ray Tracing will kill FPS but a hybrid method where the above are done by RT should boost FPS while making everything look better.

 

[FoxEye]

I think we do/should care.

Accurate lighting will make a huge difference to photo-realism in games. Lighting in games is perhaps slowly getting better, but it's still quite bad, in all honesty. Too dark/too light, too much/too little glare, etc. We want games that accurately mimic how our eyes work also; that wash out colours if we're staring directly at a bright light, for example (on a really bright day if you're staring in the direction of the sun, pretty much everything is black/white, and contrast is very low).

I think lighting in games has a ton of room for improvement.

Unless you exclusively play 2D indie platformers; in which case you don't need a GPU, and why are you even here?

 

[D3K]

Yes, very pumped for this. It truly is the next great leap in graphics tech. nVidia are not hamming it up.

Unfortunately baked in textures look absolutely great at the moment and a lot of trickery simulates what ray tracing does, so I can appreciate the sentiment that the tech is underwhelming.

 

[markymarky]

Some of the demos are great. And it's more important to note that forward/deferred rendering is basically an approximation of lighting. Ray tracing is truly analogous to how lighting works, so no more trying to fake things. It'll also be good for the movie industry who'll be able to do final CGI in real time.

One thing to note though is that I don't think there's anything specific about these cards that are fundamentally different. they're just fast enough to ray trace. The DirectX and denoisers make all the magic happen

 

[LeMson]

No, if the games were upcoming like the new forza horizon having it or something then exciting, but theres nothing

 

[markymarky]

yeah it's probably gonna take ages till games actually use it. Requires a lot of rethinking games engines. It's not really something you can just switch on and suddenly everything looks pretty

 

[D.P.]

Do we even have ray tracing support at an API level yet?

Yes, MS has added a ray tracing API to work alongside DX12. Unity engine will have this feature by end of the year for public use.

 

[D.P.]

yeah it's probably gonna take ages till games actually use it. Requires a lot of rethinking games engines. It's not really something you can just switch on and suddenly everything looks pretty

Not really true. Ray traced shadows and light ingbis already used in limited extent in current names. This technology Neill allow far more lights, higher resolution band higher speeds

 

[Kelt]

We used to get excited over 2 white squares and a moving line.

Hard to believe now, but I remember walking into a pub many, many moons ago, where there was a crowd of people surrounding something.

Me and my mates wondered what was going on, wandered over and yeh, it was an arcade machine playing Pong, first time I'd seen one.

Absolutely amazing at the time...how times have changed.

 

[markymarky]

Not really true. Ray traced shadows and light ingbis already used in limited extent in current names. This technology Neill allow far more lights, higher resolution band higher speeds

Currently only fast enough for realtime with AI based denoisers to limit to 3/4 rays per pixel. How do these neural net weights ship with games? Not saying it's impossible but requires a rethink of the rendering pipeline.

 

[deuse]

Metro Exodus is supposed to use the extra the RTX has.

So a big yes from me.

 

[FoxEye]

Wasn't it two white lines and a square?

Spoiler: Pong

He must have had the Chinese knock-off version

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

Some of the demos are great. And it's more important to note that forward/deferred rendering is basically an approximation of lighting. Ray tracing is truly analogous to how lighting works, so no more trying to fake things. It'll also be good for the movie industry who'll be able to do final CGI in real time.

One thing to note though is that I don't think there's anything specific about these cards that are fundamentally different. they're just fast enough to ray trace. The DirectX and denoisers make all the magic happen

Ray tracing is slow and cimputationally expensive, they will have to use tricks to even get simple scenes to render at 30fp

 

[bru]

He must have had the Chinese knock-off version

Now that chuckle, cheers.

 

[beany_bot]

Doesn't it all matter how many rays you decide to trace? More abviously looking better and less being easier to compute. I don't know what level is "required" but I bet the next gen GPU's can't do what that star wars demo did.

 

[bru]

Probably very true, not at a decent framerate anyway, but we have to start somewhere.
Also Turing is a complete reworking of the previous raster architecture, according to NVidia, not just a shrunk Pascal, so it could be very good at what it does, with a little ray tracing thrown in for good measure.

 

[Grandmaster Fap!]

On one hand it could be important to the world building realism, on the other i think a good story and implementation are worth more to a game than bells and whistles.

 

[D1craig]

Will this work for AMD aswell? It will take ages to be adopted if not in console games aswell. Not many pc exclusives nowadays.

 

[Steampunk]

The problem is that shortcuts are always computationally cheaper. What developer/publisher is going to massively tank framerates (slightly less so on first gen RTX cards) to make something look a bit better for an actual game? Sure, we'll get demos and some little vanity things, but we're not going to get games giving up half their framerate until we're well beyond the point of "more than enough" spare computing power. It'll be another PhysX used for spot effects here and there on some games.

 

[TNA]

I remember way way back when Ray tracing was something to only dream of happening and now seeing it as a reality really does whet my appetite. I really do hope that it becomes the next 'thing' and we see it in many games.

Same here mate. Surprised some people are like "meh"

In 5-10 years time we will have some very nice graphics using ray tracing methinks.