What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?

[mrk]

Yep. Probably the best AAA developers out there (I know that isn't saying much these days). Really looking forward to this game.

DF talk about this today:

Baked in at engine level and proprietary streaming tech. This is no doubt going to be the benchmark engine.

 

[Steve Bruce]

It's much quicker for the devs to use RT instead of making baked in lighting models that look realistic.
On a big game, if they only used RT for lighting it can save weeks of dev time, if not more.

It's also 6 years old now, so no reason people shouldn't have cards which can at least run basic GI. Indiana Jones proved this so hopefully more will follow.

I understand why the industry wants me to want RT. Developers having to do less work isn't a plus point to me, it's a plus point for them and the weeks saved in development won't be reflected in savings on the price of a game.

The fact remains that 4060 cards which is the mainstream card isn't capable of great performance RT. The 5090 with full path tracing needs DLSS4 & multiple frame gen to get a smooth experience as seen on one of their slides on their website and it's not even out yet.

I just hope RT is at a minimum and doesn't affect the performance too much in new games unless the user decides to turn it up.

 

[Calin Banc]

I understand why the industry wants me to want RT. Developers having to do less work isn't a plus point to me, it's a plus point for them and the weeks saved in development won't be reflected in savings on the price of a game.

The fact remains that 4060 cards which is the mainstream card isn't capable of great performance RT. The 5090 with full path tracing needs DLSS4 & multiple frame gen to get a smooth experience as seen on one of their slides on their website and it's not even out yet.

I just hope RT is at a minimum and doesn't affect the performance too much in new games unless the user decides to turn it up.

What constitutes a smooth experience, in terms of FPS?

 

[Pottsey]

What constitutes a smooth experience, in terms of FPS?

That depends on the game and personal preference. In a fast paced FPS game 60FPS is playable but ideally you really want 100+FPS to be truly smooth. In a turn based strategy you can often get away with 30FPS sometimes even 15FPS when there are no animations. Slow RPGs like Metro 100FPS is ideal but 30fps to 60fps is playable.

 

[mrk]

15fps... My mind is running amok!

 

[Noxia]

I think I get 15fps when I press the next slide button on Powerpoint. I'd imagine it feels much the same.

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

Maybe this deserves a thread of its own but How does everyone feel about the current state of special effects and physics in video games?

Second question to tie it back to the thread title, do games that have heavy RT affects lack in these departments as a tradeoff for maintaining FPS. Or is it something we are seeing across the board.

I seem to remember a complaint about how physics hadn’t progressed significantly when compared to Battlefield bad company( that was the game with fully destructible environments?) is this true?

I was watching some Indiana Jones gameplay and some things I picked up on where:

muddy water that looked like plastic
a very bad looking waterfall
Poor fire effects (seems to flicker to mask how bad it looks but the light emitted doesn’t flicker)
Smoke looked low quality. It lacked volume or in other instance the quantity of smoke was low.
Some really bad destruction affects. Legitimately looks it is from a few console generations ago. From about 40 mins in the video.
Skin looks plastic at times.
Seems like certain items that can be interacted with don’t cast shadows.
I wasn’t able to see what fur was like on the dogs.

 

[Rroff]

a very bad looking waterfall

Actually quite hard to do in games especially if not just background scenery - something that has always disappointed me. Likewise with smoke and steam in general few games take the time to implement a physics based solution with proper volumetrics, etc. and it can really pull you out of some games like The Division for example.

 

[Capitano]

I like visuals in games so any chance I can turn it on I can

 

[Chuk_Chuk]

Actually quite hard to do in games especially if not just background scenery - something that has always disappointed me. Likewise with smoke and steam in general few games take the time to implement a physics based solution with proper volumetrics, etc. and it can really pull you out of some games like The Division for example.

I get that waterfalls are difficult as they combine a lot of elements that just chew into per frame processing time, but I'm pretty certain the ones i've seen in past game I've played look better than the one in the video.

Regarding smoke, well that what kicked off this whole thing for me. I was watching a video about the PS2 emotion engine. Silent Hill 2 on the xbox had to turn down the smoke affect because it could not handle rendering it, even though it was objectively more powerful than the PS2.
So I'm wondering where are we now the SFX? Sidenote: rewatching the video is there even a modern game with same volume of smoke affects as Silent Hill 2 on the PS2?

 

[Calin Banc]

That depends on the game and personal preference. In a fast paced FPS game 60FPS is playable but ideally you really want 100+FPS to be truly smooth. In a turn based strategy you can often get away with 30FPS sometimes even 15FPS when there are no animations. Slow RPGs like Metro 100FPS is ideal but 30fps to 60fps is playable.

I'd say 60 fps is pretty smooth tbh and is plenty for a high fidelity target.

Maybe this deserves a thread of its own but How does everyone feel about the current state of special effects and physics in video games?

Second question to tie it back to the thread title, do games that have heavy RT affects lack in these departments as a tradeoff for maintaining FPS. Or is it something we are seeing across the board.

I seem to remember a complaint about how physics hadn’t progressed significantly when compared to Battlefield bad company( that was the game with fully destructible environments?) is this true?

I was watching some Indiana Jones gameplay and some things I picked up on where:

muddy water that looked like plastic
a very bad looking waterfall
Poor fire effects (seems to flicker to mask how bad it looks but the light emitted doesn’t flicker)
Smoke looked low quality. It lacked volume or in other instance the quantity of smoke was low.
Some really bad destruction affects. Legitimately looks it is from a few console generations ago. From about 40 mins in the video.
Skin looks plastic at times.
Seems like certain items that can be interacted with don’t cast shadows.
I wasn’t able to see what fur was like on the dogs.

Bad Company had prebacked physics, everything got destroyed in the same way over and over again. Red Faction is what you're looking for.

Hydrophobia: Indigo profecy is the one for water physics.

In general it depends on o how much effort Devs put into games.

Guilty are also the gamers who find excuses for terrible gameplay implementation, visuals, etc. New Vegas is quite bad all around and yet it's highly praised.

 

[Glanza]

 

[gpuerrilla]

Hair and Fur.

 

[mrk]

Hellblade 1 with Rt is rather massive fps hit, nearly 100fps just setting RT to high lol. Does look good for UE4 though, and yeah loads of shader comp stutter.

 

[Nasher]

Maybe this deserves a thread of its own but How does everyone feel about the current state of special effects and physics in video games?

Second question to tie it back to the thread title, do games that have heavy RT affects lack in these departments as a tradeoff for maintaining FPS. Or is it something we are seeing across the board.

I seem to remember a complaint about how physics hadn’t progressed significantly when compared to Battlefield bad company( that was the game with fully destructible environments?) is this true?

I was watching some Indiana Jones gameplay and some things I picked up on where:

muddy water that looked like plastic
a very bad looking waterfall
Poor fire effects (seems to flicker to mask how bad it looks but the light emitted doesn’t flicker)
Smoke looked low quality. It lacked volume or in other instance the quantity of smoke was low.
Some really bad destruction affects. Legitimately looks it is from a few console generations ago. From about 40 mins in the video.
Skin looks plastic at times.
Seems like certain items that can be interacted with don’t cast shadows.
I wasn’t able to see what fur was like on the dogs.

Physics and AI haven't improved.

AI is especially bad in modern games. With the "AI revolution" going on you'd think it would have improved massively, but nope.

 

[Doctor]

Physics and AI haven't improved.

AI is especially bad in modern games. With the "AI revolution" going on you'd think it would have improved massively, but nope.

As someone who builds AI models, I think we are not very good at making AI that is bad in a fun way. It's very easy to make an AI that either doesn't work, or completely destroys you and gives you no chance. There is a lot of human touch needed to make game AI that is fun to interact with.

Chess is a great example, we have had AI that is 'smarter' than humans for decades, but nobody enjoys playing against it.

 

[Nasher]

As someone who builds AI models, I think we are not very good at making AI that is bad in a fun way. It's very easy to make an AI that either doesn't work, or completely destroys you and gives you no chance. There is a lot of human touch needed to make game AI that is fun to interact with.

Chess is a great example, we have had AI that is 'smarter' than humans for decades, but nobody enjoys playing against it.

But it's also no fun when it can only see 3 meters in front of it and dumb as a post. Half-Life 1 has much better Ai than most modern games and that came out in 1998.

The AI the Indiana Jones game is so unresponsive you can just run through enemy areas and be out of range before they go "did you hear something?" lol

The common mistake made when making "hard" AI is they just make it so it never misses, or make enemies in to bullet sponges.

 

[Kirby Wurm]

Now that I have an RTX 5080 my thoughts on RT haven't changed. It's a nice to have but still has too much of a performance hit for many games, a good example being Darktide. Despite being co-op multiplayer so not a twitch shooter, it simply isn't worth the lower framerate/input lag from FG.

Single player can be different, CP2077 looks fantastic and I look forward to giving Indiana Jones a go, as well as replaying Metro Exodus: EE. Worth the hit? Maybe.

 

[Tinek]

I understand why the industry wants me to want RT. Developers having to do less work isn't a plus point to me, it's a plus point for them and the weeks saved in development won't be reflected in savings on the price of a game.

Most of all I don't understand why some enthusiasts imagine we'll get RT effects like in Hollywood movies - I suggest to watch some documentaries, to see how much computational power and storage/vRAM such things take to really calculate. Example from one of the newest Godzilla movies silly water animation, with calculated physics took over 70TB of storage, with whole gigantic server farms to do PT of it. Few years ago some films with glass and proper reflections were way too expensive to calculate, so they were doing literally optimisations like game devs had to - lower resolution models, baked-in lights in places, loads of post-production fixes to make it look well, multiple passes, additional simplifications in physics and objects etc. - just to get sensibly fast (within few months not years) output from again gigantic server farms. We will not get such quality of PT in games in the next 50+ years, if ever! It's the simple truth. And yes, even Hollywood does a lot of optimisations and simplifications for PT to run sensibly fast on big server farms and we have some people here saying they don't want ANY optimisation in games, just pure PT. Good luck with that! Holly grail of graphics in games perhaps, but not achievable in our reality - we'll always have some poor-man version of it in games.

 

[Tinek]

Maybe this deserves a thread of its own but How does everyone feel about the current state of special effects and physics in video games?

It's rubbish, in short words.

Second question to tie it back to the thread title, do games that have heavy RT affects lack in these departments as a tradeoff for maintaining FPS. Or is it something we are seeing across the board.

Likely, RT is a power-hog and always will be.

I seem to remember a complaint about how physics hadn’t progressed significantly when compared to Battlefield bad company( that was the game with fully destructible environments?) is this true?

Game devs (even BF ones) blabbered that physics in games make players confused, it's impossible to balance, lighting doesn't handle it well etc. - loads of silly excuses, when we've seen already great examples of it working well in older games (Red Faction, BF BC etc.). I reckon it's just hard to do, so they rather don't.

I was watching some Indiana Jones gameplay and some things I picked up on where:

muddy water that looked like plastic

Yep, I've said earlier the same - it just looks really bad.

a very bad looking waterfall

Indeed.

Poor fire effects (seems to flicker to mask how bad it looks but the light emitted doesn’t flicker)

Bad TAA filtering on low resolution effect, yes.

Smoke looked low quality. It lacked volume or in other instance the quantity of smoke was low.

Same as above, just not good.

Some really bad destruction affects. Legitimately looks it is from a few console generations ago. From about 40 mins in the video.

As I said earlier, devs don't know how to do it well anymore, it feels.

Skin looks plastic at times.

Partially because of the upscaling on older (convolution model) DLSS, which eats all the sub-surface scattering and other bits that make skin look real - apparently. To me it looks just as bad with TAA, though.

Seems like certain items that can be interacted with don’t cast shadows.

Because PT isn't really PT in games - they're all still hybrid and will be for generations to come, I suspect.