What do gamers actually think about Ray-Tracing?

[mountaincow]

You can and do get noise over USB too introduced by components on the mobo. It's less of an issue on higher end boards but can happen still depending on the quality of components the mobo maker has chosen, the quality of the PSU and suchlike. That's why people can hear pops and crackles on USB at times, but not via optical. Again, totally depends on the number of devices, quality of the USB controller, quality of surrounding components feeding off the same power etc etc.
My previous mobo had dedicated USB ports designed to be used by DACs and other audio devices, it was called the AMP-UP USB port, isolated from the rest of the mobo so could not get any interference from anything else. Not all boards have this type of setup.

If all is well, then 99% of setups should see zero audible difference between USB and optical out from the mobo.


This is not accurate, look at previous cards vs current cards, more RT cores has meant better fps in RT situations. The CPU isn't that relevant when playing at 1440p or above as evidenced by every screenshot showing an RTSS overlay, the GPU is doing all the work, the CPU just has to pass along the next frame instruction which isn't that much of a task. As an example a 12600K or greater CPU will still smash through path tracing on a high end GPU with ease, the fps difference will be there but it won't be huge as the bulk of the workload is being done by the GPU.

If the resolution is at one that is CPU bound like 1080p, then this all changes, again evidenced by any screenshot or video showing an RTSS overlay.

I did say the tech is in its infancy. When it's better there's no reason it couldn't be used to improve audio. Anyway you don't need to simulate all audio sources. Only some could improve immersion a lot, but yes it would use a lot of resources to do and is far more complicated than light.

 

[mountaincow]

Both light and audio are waves, same physics apply - it's ray tracing in both cases. Just audio carries relatively less information, so should be much easier to do raytracing on it, even with existing hardware. It's been tested and it's in development, but will it ever see the light for consumers? That is hard to predict, as not much demand is for that, so far, as mentioned earlier.

With just a few paths on those sources that make the most sense I think we could get some decent occlusion and some diffraction, which would be awesome.
Lighting is clearly the easier thing to implement and sell so it's not going to happen for a while.

 

[Tinek]

When I say noise I mean noise that exhibits itself through the speakers, the "noise" at a circuitry level is irrelevant in that context as output noise is all the same regardless, so yeah I am on about noise that you can hear, whether hiss, pops or crackles etc. This is why some mobos have USB ports specifically engineered to eliminate this, like my last mobo as mentioned already.

Most of such symptoms are caused by high DPC latency, which is caused by drivers of various equipment (often having nothing to do with USB itself). Fun fact, I have not had such issues on AMD GPUs, but then on my 4090 I did for a while - till NVIDIA, after many many months admitted to have been caused by their drivers and fixed it (at least for me, some people still claim it's not fixed). DCP latency on NVIDIA drivers is in general WAY higher than on AMD ones, hence more problems with sound of this kind. Again, it's nothing to do with USB as such, it's everything to do with bugs (or bad design) in other drivers causing latency spikes.

All it takes is a USB clock rate hitch or a conected USB device to do something dodgy and you end up with audio clicks and stutters even if it's a 1 second thing. That's the sort of thing I am referring too.

As per above. Problem is that DCP latency influences optical connection too, not just USB - but easier to hear by USB apparently.

 

[Tinek]

With just a few paths on those sources that make the most sense I think we could get some decent occlusion and some diffraction, which would be awesome.
Lighting is clearly the easier thing to implement and sell so it's not going to happen for a while.

It seems audio is actually easier - much less accuracy needed, less rays etc. It requires company like NVIDIA to push it to devs, pay them for it and then implement to popularise. AMD tried and failed with their solution (close to 0 interest), NVIDIA is busy with AI, so unlikely they will care for audio anytime soon. Creative and the likes are more of a niche these days, so have no big leverage either. As is now, the film industry at home moved to Dolby Atmos and I reckon if anything, that will be showing up in more PC games. In same xBox games it's already present almost everywhere, but on PC it's still rare to see.

 

[mrk]

Yes DPC latency still exists even on 40 series cards. Just running Latencymon for 30 mins and using the PC for random things will show spikes with the end report showing the nvidia driver causing the highest spikes.

 

[Tinek]

Yes DPC latency still exists even on 40 series cards. Just running Latencymon for 30 mins and using the PC for random things will show spikes with the end report showing the nvidia driver causing the highest spikes.

That's correct, I have seen it on mine too. Though, the fixes NVIDIA released at least stopped random sound popping for me and it looks a bit better. I reckon, they consider it good enough so won't bother fixing it further, as it could influence FPS in games negatively and that matters for them much more.

 

[mrk]

Yeah it's much better than it used to be, but it's not truly fixed. Maybe another 3 driver releases later

 

[Calin Banc]

Tbh I see no appreciable difference worth bothering about in your screenshot comparison examples- actually think raster looks better lol!

Slower paced games it will shine through more I suppose, but fast paced shooters the effects are either not going to be that noticeable due to the nature of the game or turned off in favour of framerate.

If someone stays in prone in the dark area, you're not gonna see it (click and see the comparison), doesn't matter if is slow or fast paced. In some situation the difference between Raster and Path tracing is night and day.

Normally all online games should have a fix graphical settings that you cannot change - and err more towards higher end.

 

[Gerard]

If someone stays in prone in the dark area, you're not gonna see it (click and see the comparison), doesn't matter if is slow or fast paced. In some situation the difference between Raster and Path tracing is night and day.

Normally all online games should have a fix graphical settings that you cannot change - and err more towards higher end.

Still doesn't take away from the fact that most people prefer framerate, especially for shooters, and until ray\path tracing can be done with a minimal hit it's still going to be the red headed stepchild that people won't enable.

And when it comes to online shooters it's even less likely as people routinely dial down settings in favour of framerate and have done for decades now, trying to force people to use higher settings with some type of lockout won't be taken well.

 

[Nexus18]

Still doesn't take away from the fact that most people prefer framerate, especially for shooters, and until ray\path tracing can be done with a minimal hit it's still going to be the red headed stepchild that people won't enable.

And when it comes to online shooters it's even less likely as people routinely dial down settings in favour of framerate and have done for decades now, trying to force people to use higher settings with some type of lockout won't be taken well.

See the finals. RT gi and performance is very good.

 

[Calin Banc]

Still doesn't take away from the fact that most people prefer framerate, especially for shooters, and until ray\path tracing can be done with a minimal hit it's still going to be the red headed stepchild that people won't enable.

And when it comes to online shooters it's even less likely as people routinely dial down settings in favour of framerate and have done for decades now, trying to force people to use higher settings with some type of lockout won't be taken well.

You can always go down Metro EE road which has a very good and fast implementation of RT or just lock the settings of raster to high/ultra/whatever.

 

[Grim5]

 

[Gerard]

You can always go down Metro EE road which has a very good and fast implementation of RT or just lock the settings of raster to high/ultra/whatever.

Depends what type of frame rate you're looking for, if you've got a 240hz screen or thereabouts I'd think most setting would be barebones on more recent games.

I think Doom 3 would have made for a good ray\path tracing showcase, its the oddball of the doom games where they changed the pacing to a crawl vs the other games. And you only have a few enemies on screen at any one time, it would have been interesting to see what that looked like with rt\pt built into it. Maybe that's something for the future as they dabbled with it in quake.

 

[Gerard]

7:57, that looks nice with the zombies walking along with the doorway light behind them.

 

[KompuKare]

I don't think I get your argument. You are laughing at "RT is the future" because you don't believe it? And your justification for this is because today the vast majority of games are raster? It's not like it was a choice between the two and devs chose not to use RT - its new tech. It's been said a few times in this thread that it's a benefit to game devs. It is a significant time saver and they WILL use it over raster. It's not even debatable. Raster will eventually die. Raster was just a workaround for visualisation, a means to an end for the hardware limitations of its time. RT allows lighting to be done correctly, and accurately, and with almost zero effort.

Or it was? A pure choice between the two with one major caveat:
To do RT well, you have to design everything for only RT. Where RT is an afterthought (because raster is first to, you know, address the rest of the market - and RT users can use raster too), it tends to show up problems where things often look too dark. Yes, more realistic considering the actual light sources but often not really fun to play (HDR1200 OLED users in a dark cellar excepted).

So the developer did raster first, raster second and thirdly added some RT features; but what didn't do is over all their light sources, textures, reflectivity etc. to make RT look more their hand-crafted raster sceene.

Maybe I don’t understand it but the majority of users are like me and hence RT won’t gain a big traction until the next gen consoles employ it more in their game development.

Thanks for pointing out that my observation that RT was a marketing tool to sell more GPUs for Nvidia was wrong.

Next gen, or the gen after, but my point continues to be: RT won't look good until developers drop almost all raster support and raster techniques become the afterthought.

Nope, remember RT is the future… the present is irrelevant.

The truth is adoption is slow (but steady) because the majority of hardware can’t use it to anything like game changing levels. Right now if games developers want to target the majority of cross platform gamers, then they have to develop primarily for the raster race and not the master race.

What might get developers thinking "RT first, raster last" is if some company with very deep pockets and good at AI etc. created a tool which took a RT developed scene and did all that it would take to mimic this with raster. For some reason a certain $trillion company doesn't want to help raster.

I’ll be honest in games like CP the RT is noticeably better, but mainly because the raster version is so compromised and poor looking. In most games I can make out the RT effects and if I can get them playable with RT and quality level upscaling, then I leave RT on.

Though in my opinion the two biggest IQ improvements for gaming in the past 10 years, is VRR and HDR. For me even my HDR 600 IPS monitor shows a big impact in black levels and colours. My son’s HDR 1000 1440p monitor was fairly cheap and looks great for HDR content. It really makes a difference and it has no performance hit.

It's almost like it is with temporal AA being almost the only AA option: such a compromised image compared to what it could be that upscalers can actually look better than "native" - because "native" is far from the game should look like.

 

[ICDP]

Or it was? A pure choice between the two with one major caveat:
To do RT well, you have to design everything for only RT. Where RT is an afterthought (because raster is first to, you know, address the rest of the market - and RT users can use raster too), it tends to show up problems where things often look too dark. Yes, more realistic considering the actual light sources but often not really fun to play (HDR1200 OLED users in a dark cellar excepted).

So the developer did raster first, raster second and thirdly added some RT features; but what didn't do is over all their light sources, textures, reflectivity etc. to make RT look more their hand-crafted raster sceene.


Next gen, or the gen after, but my point continues to be: RT won't look good until developers drop almost all raster support and raster techniques become the afterthought.

What might get developers thinking "RT first, raster last" is if some company with very deep pockets and good at AI etc. created a tool which took a RT developed scene and did all that it would take to mimic this with raster. For some reason a certain $trillion company doesn't want to help raster.

It's almost like it is with temporal AA being almost the only AA option: such a compromised image compared to what it could be that upscalers can actually look better than "native" - because "native" is far from the game should look like.

I’ve argued this many times. Degraded AA routines that look terrible. They start with crap and make it less crap, then claim “better than native”.

 

[ooStevo]

Audio for me is all about high quality stereo imaging, that's why I have big bookshelf point-source speakers that envelope my ears in almost holophonic surround sound. Obviously that type of setup requires a dedicated amplifier to drive them, but these aren't exactly expensive either, my current amp is no larger than 2 DVD cases on top of each other yet kicks out some serious audio quality for well under £200. Sound direction in games matters just as much as the visuals for me. If the graphics are great but sound not so great, then that can break the game for me, but not the other way round. Sound is always #1.

And yeah soundcards are defunct nowadays. Direct USB out to an amp or DAC or optical out from your motherboard's onboard sound (don't worry, it;s basically 1:1 to a USB connection regardless of what some on online groups might say) and actually maybe optical is the better method because you quite literally isolate the signal from any potential interference or timing issue that can come from USB depending on how many USB devices are connected, the quality of the mobo's USB subsystem, any electrical noise on any part of the PC/house electrics etc etc. As USB is a physical connection going over copper, you can get noise and interference due to the above, but you cannot get the same issue with optical out, it's just light and ignores any copper instabilities.



This is a common misconception. ray racing (especially path tracing) is incredibly demanding on any GPU. Look at Pixar movies for example, going back to the dawn of time it has taken and still takes an ice age to render uncompressed frames and it's only in recent times with upscaling and frame gen has that reached a realistic level of performance. Now with newer gens of GPUs coming with more and more RT cores, this becomes less of an issue with less reliance on upscaling going forwards as the number of RT cores and Tensor cores increases on the GPU die (as fabrication processes get more dense).

It isn't a simple case of industry push, the technology has to evolve, and RT core generation has to advance, and currently there is only one vendor advancing in that area, never guess who

For years AMD just didn't care, the CEO even publicly stated as such, only Nvidia put the R&D into ray tracing and came up with ways to get high performance ray tracing for games. And it's only within the last year really that Intel has taken notes and started their introduction into this whole RT/upscaling field with Samsung not far behind with SoCs for mobile devices pushing ray tracing effects in equal real-time.

Edit*

Here are some fresh comparisons to really drive home the visual impact of RT vs PT vs Raster when all 3 are set to their highest methods in Cyberpunk.

1: https://imgsli.com/MjQ1ODU0
2: https://imgsli.com/MjQ1ODUz

My TV supports Dolby Atmos. But I have a very old Technics stacker. I'd love to upgrade my sound experience. Can you recommend me something inexpensive,but still decent sounding. I'm happy just starting with Left/Right speakers to begin with.

 

[ooStevo]

Snip...


If only devs. had all the time in the world like the old days to get great looking lighting and shadows........ and also if we're happy to stick with less dynamic worlds where everything is pre-baked.....

Who cares if it's pre baked? It looks great doesn't it? I said SP Chaos Theory because it's an old game,and it still looks great. You sound like you should lay off the salt btw.

 

[Zarax]

Doesn't Forza Horizon 5 actually use ray traced audio?

https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=c82f573eab19bd55JmltdHM9MTcwOTk0MjQwMCZpZ3VpZD0wMjgwYTJiMi03ODliLTYxYmUtMDE4ZC1iMWQ2NzliYzYwMDYmaW5zaWQ9NTI1OQ&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=3&fclid=0280a2b2-789b-61be-018d-b1d679bc6006&psq=forza+horizon+5+ray+traced+audio&u=a1aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cueW91dHViZS5jb20vd2F0Y2g_dj01V0o3REFadk5sVQ&ntb=1

 

[Nexus18]

Or it was? A pure choice between the two with one major caveat:
To do RT well, you have to design everything for only RT. Where RT is an afterthought (because raster is first to, you know, address the rest of the market - and RT users can use raster too), it tends to show up problems where things often look too dark. Yes, more realistic considering the actual light sources but often not really fun to play (HDR1200 OLED users in a dark cellar excepted).

So the developer did raster first, raster second and thirdly added some RT features; but what didn't do is over all their light sources, textures, reflectivity etc. to make RT look more their hand-crafted raster sceene.


Next gen, or the gen after, but my point continues to be: RT won't look good until developers drop almost all raster support and raster techniques become the afterthought.

What might get developers thinking "RT first, raster last" is if some company with very deep pockets and good at AI etc. created a tool which took a RT developed scene and did all that it would take to mimic this with raster. For some reason a certain $trillion company doesn't want to help raster.

It's almost like it is with temporal AA being almost the only AA option: such a compromised image compared to what it could be that upscalers can actually look better than "native" - because "native" is far from the game should look like.

You or someone else keeps saying this but as shown, this isn't necessarily always the case.... Also, having a display capable of an infinite contrast ratio with true blacks doesn't neccasrily mean you see details more easily, more often than not, a calibrated oled will actually show less detail than an average lcd display i.e. the way the film creator intended the scene to be viewed, the scene with morgan freeman in oblivion is often used as an example here as a lot of tvs shows the background/wall where as a calibrated high end display won't show the wall at all, it will be pure black. HDR is something completely different too.

Personally I find rooms/areas which have no lights at all but a weird glow/illumination to look very of and quite immersion breaking now, even in cartoon style games.

Suppose it's subjective but there isn't a single game where raster looks better than RT to me except for hogwarts and that's because it broken (maybe fixed but not looked).

Or more devs could just do what we have seen with spiderman 2, metro ee, avatar? Just don't provide any fallback to raster or/and gradaully focus more on RT effects than raster effects then you end up with a game looking awful raster wise e.g. dying light 2 and warhammer darktide/gotham knights (where the SSR look beyond bad).

A tool to provide RT visual quality but still be raster? That completely defeats the purpose of RT and everything it is seeking to resolve. The industry wants to move on from raster not add further band aids to it.....

On temporal upscalers, Alex did a good video on this showcasing the pros and cons:

As per the video, there are a few games with SMAA, MSAA etc. (which are regarded as being the "best") but problem is, the image looks even worse with these than TAA because of how games are developed now.

Who cares if it's pre baked? It looks great doesn't it? I said SP Chaos Theory because it's an old game,and it still looks great. You sound like you should lay off the salt btw.

Salty?

No just pointing out facts, as simple as that.

Again, do some reading on ray tracing to educate yourself on what it seeks to resolve.