It's just because newer games have too much to effectively ray trace, so they have to use it in a very limited manner. There are very few games fully ray traced.
Ray traced quake looks more like real video than a lot of those modern games do; it just looks like some kind of theme park/old theater costume type of deal with a lot of rubber because the materials aren't as good.
Yeah, for sure. Raytracing is very computationally intensive. It doesn't make sense to do full-scene raytracing unless you have hardware that's specifically designed for it. It works for something like quake since none of the scenes are particularly complex, but obviously you don't hit anything close to the same framerates as you would with raster rendering.
I feel like gamedevs and game publishers are more excited about raytracing than consumers, because it would allow them to throw out the entire range of ~~smokes and mirrors~~ tricks currently used for simulating lighting. Which makes the code simpler and cheaper to implement.
Raytracing is really the more obvious way of implementing complex lighting, it's just always been out of reach performance-wise.
Well, it still is. Games still use those same tricks and then only mild raytracing on top for the finishing touches.
Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.
Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.
Ray tracing also doesn't replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.
The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.
The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.
The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia's money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.
Yeah, fair response. I started writing that comment thinking "if it's in high-end hardware now, it'll be broadly available in 10–20 years".
Then with the last sentence, I realized that it isn't in high-end hardware, not in the form that allows you to throw out all the tricks.
And with publishers simultaneously wanting ever more fidelity, which makes it more expensive to calculate appropriate raytracing, yeah, I would be surprised, if that happens in our lifetime, too.
I guess, I'm personally somewhat excited at the thought of not having to learn all the tricks, with me having dabbled in gamedev as a hobbyist.
But yesterday, the (completely unilluminated) 2D gravity simulation I'm working on started kicking in my fans and you see me immediately investigating, because I'm certainly a lot more excited about making it available to as many people as possible...
I'm not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.
The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the "tricks" that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).
Unfortunately, the bad news is that you'd still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!
Hope you make something cool from the hobby!
I think part of the push is just from Nvidia to try and get vendor lock-in, like they have with CUDA. Many games that use raytracing will only work on "RTX" cards which are only sold by Nvidia. Raytracing also has the benefit of increasing demand for upscaling, like DLSS, which further increases vendor lock-in.
Also, most devs are going to be using some sort of game engine where the hard parts of rasterization are already taken care of, like with Lumen in Unreal Engine 5.
Raytracing is still very computationally intensive, and doesn't have enough market penetration to make sense on most modern games. Devs need to implement two solutions: a raytraced path and a raster path. The game needs to be fully playable in both, across a wide range on hardware. The largest install base for most games is still console, where RT barely exists. So RT is generally relegated to eye candy for high-end PC. Which makes it a marketing feature, not a game feature.
It'll be interesting to see if that changes with the PS5 Pro. I expect we'll see more first-party titles support it, but not much else until the next real console generation.
I expect it to change with the next gen consoles at best ( ps6, xbox whatewer tf ). Beacuse with them we might finally be able to see the games that just straight up abandon traditional rasterization and go full ray tracing only ( also the last strugglers on pc will probably finally abandon gpus without raytracing support by that time, pepole tend to complain on consoles for 'slowing down progress' but dont see the absolutely ancient devices most or to be precise significant minority of gamers use ). For now even with ps5 pro they still need to create ps5 version.
I think the tech industry misses the good old days when the upgrade was noticable and exciting. Now it's just this big media blitz and the upgrades are not that noticeable. Lol, nothin like watching a 30 minute video that they flip back and forth with. "Oh, I can see the difference"
Imo it has less to do with photorealism vs non-photorealism and more to do with pbr (physically based rendering) vs non-pbr. The former attempts to recreate photorealistic graphics by adding additional texture maps (typically metallic/smooth or specular/roughness) to allow for things ranging from glossiness and reflectivity, to refraction and sub-surface scattering. The result is that PBR materials tend to have little to no noticeable difference between PBR enabled renderers so long as they share the same maps.
Non-pbr renderers, however, tend to be more inaccurate and tend to have visual quirks or "signatures". For an example, to me everything made in UE3 tends to have a weird plastic-y look to it, while metals in Skyrim tend to look like foam cosplay weapons. These games can significantly benefit from raytracing because it'd involve replacing the non-pbr renderer with a PBR renderer, resulting in a significant upgrade in visual quality by itself. Throw in raytracing and you get beautiful shadows, speculars, reflections, and so on in a game previously incapable of it.
I'm an old gamedev and for me the goal of ray tracing was always photo realism.
Raster shaders can get you toon shading, enough photo realism, funky effects and so on.
I prefer going to the myseum and looking at impressionist art than photos.
But that's maybe just me.
Look at Pixar and other Disney CG stuff. Raytracing enhances stylized art just as much as photorealistic art. Something like Moana or Elemental is meaningfully enhanced by their work on water and glass transmission simulation.
Teardown has wonderful raytracing but again they're not going for photo realism
Note that teardown does not use hardware ray tracing.
A couple newer games have raytracing that genuinely adds detail but it’s pretty subtle and you have to look for it. Cyberpunk 2077 is a good example.
Portal and Minecraft are particularly good examples of raytracing because of how their sandbox aspects let you play with it.
There absolutely is a factor that modern graphics are so even without ray tracing is doesn’t add a whole lot. I still think Destiny 2 is one of the best looking games I’ve played and it uses fairly “old” graphics technology. The reason it looks good is their artists do a good job.
I think Gothic 3 had a realistic lightning mod, but they had to cheat because the company made the buildings so they looked good with the original lightning.
So, yeah, does not always work.
Quake II RTX is still probably the best graphics I’ve seen. In its own way.
I totally agree. Quake GL improved quake 100 fold. RT quake did the same all over again
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