What are some new innovations in the field of visuals?

[LebowskiBuschemi]

So I was wondering what some crazy new innovations are in terms of visual fidelity(cmputer graphics). As in, new kinds of algorithms and stuff. I guess one example of an innovation is DLSS which uses an AI algorithm. Are there any other new innovations? 

[Levent]

Real time ray tracing, variable rate shading.

[Mel0nMan]

As you were saying, DLSS and that sort of thing. But there’s not really much else that’s novel. Heck, Nvidia released a ray tracing demo for the GTX 480. Although ray tracing on newer GPUs works a bit differently.

[LebowskiBuschemi]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

As you were saying, DLSS and that sort of thing. But there’s not really much else that’s novel. Heck, Nvidia released a ray tracing demo for the GTX 480. Although ray tracing on newer GPUs works a bit differently.

Could you mention a few of new decent innovations? 

[Levent]

6 minutes ago, LebowskiBuschemi said:

Could you mention a few of new decent innovations? 

There arent many, IMO game visual effects have been stagnant since 2009 with the release of DX11. Only since 2018 we started seeing changes that were making noticeable impact to how games looked. Vulkan API has been one of the most significant under the hood changes, RTRT and VRS has been the most noticeable improvement to video game VFX of the past decade.

[Mel0nMan]

8 minutes ago, LebowskiBuschemi said:

Could you mention a few of new decent innovations? 

As was said above, there hasn't been anything that really redefines the world of VFX or gaming in a while. Sure, new stuff like DLSS has come along but games work fine without it. Hence why I'm still using a GTX 980. Only reason why I upgraded from a 600 series card is it didn't have enough VRAM for CAD models. 

[Mark Kaine]

Btw they did real time raytracing before Nvidia RTX cards... pretty sure as early as in the 90s but hard to find info about that now because everything on google is full of "RTX" PR...However earliest game with real time ray tracing i know of is ROTTR, which was released in 2015 so its not really new.

 

6 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

there hasn't been anything that really redefines the world of VFX or gaming in a while. Sure, new stuff like DLSS has come along but games work fine without it

i agree, there hasn't really been much innovation recently, lots of games seem stuck around PS360 era or have even regressed (physics etc arent really a focus anymore) with few exceptions that at least try to have top notch texture / lighting work, which of course will dwarf what was possible 10 years ago, but its really rare. 

 

ps: i still want Deep Down, dammit, that looked great!

[LebowskiBuschemi]

Can I be real honest with you guys? I was given an assignment for this course that I have to write a summary on recent innovations in visual fidelity and honestly, there ain't much. 

[Mel0nMan]

2 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Btw they did real time raytracing before Nvidia RTX cards... pretty sure as early as in the 90s but hard to find info about that now because everything on google is full of "RTX" PR...However earliest game with real time ray tracing i know of is ROTTR, which was released in 2015 so its not really new.

 

i agree, there hasn't really been much innovation recently, lots of games seem stuck around PS360 era or have even regressed (physics etc arent really a focus anymore) with few exceptions that at least try to have top notch texture / lighting work, which of course will dwarf what was possible 10 years ago, but its really rare. 

 

ps: i still want Deep Down, dammit, that looked great!

No clue ROTTR had real time raytracing. Perhaps I've been using it all along without even knowing? That must be where all my VRAM went lol

[Mel0nMan]

Just now, LebowskiBuschemi said:

Can I be real honest with you guys? I was given an assignment for this course that I have to write a summary on recent innovations in visual fidelity and honestly, there ain't much. 

Yeah, there really ain't much unfortunately. 

I think your main focus could be AI upscaling as that's kind of new to happen in real time. It's been around for a while but to be implemented into a game, processed in real time, is relatively new.

You could also talk about raytracing hardware on the GPU itself but eh... less major. You can do raytracing on graphing calculators

[porina]

52 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

However earliest game with real time ray tracing i know of is ROTTR, which was released in 2015 so its not really new.

I'm not familiar with that game but keeping in mind that RTX launched September 2018, how does a game released 3 years earlier do it? SOTTR which released about the same time as RTX GPUs did use some of the lighting features, but is not what I'd call the full RT experience. In a quick search it appears to use RT shadows only.

[Mark Kaine]

53 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

No clue ROTTR had real time raytracing. Perhaps I've been using it all along without even knowing? That must be where all my VRAM went lol

yeah... honestly it doesn't do much outside of the russian level from what Ive seen but it does look nice there (maybe other snowy areas too, geothermal valley possibly too)

 

 

ps: of course this could have been added later, but it doesn't use RTX afaik.

 

56 minutes ago, LebowskiBuschemi said:

Can I be real honest with you guys? I was given an assignment for this course that I have to write a summary on recent innovations in visual fidelity and honestly, there ain't much. 

you just have to go with 4k, 4k, 4k, raytracing and DLSS... there isn't really much else, and the latter two are kind of "innovative" I guess.

 

[Mark Kaine]

5 minutes ago, porina said:

I'm not familiar with that game but keeping in mind that RTX launched September 2018, how does a game released 3 years earlier do it?

you dont need RTX for raytracing...? its just computational intensive,  but something like a 1080ti supports it and can do it,  at ~30fps, probably...

 

7 minutes ago, porina said:

but is not what I'd call the full RT experience. In a quick search it appears to use RT shadows only.

its actually shadows and reflections in ROTTR (they count shadows as reflections apparently)  but isn't that what RTX does also? There is no "full raytracing experience" as far im concerned,  with very few exceptions.

[Mel0nMan]

12 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

yeah... honestly it doesn't do much outside of the russian level from what Ive seen but it does look nice there (maybe other snowy areas too, geothermal valley possibly too)

 

 

ps: of course this could have been added later, but it doesn't use RTX afaik.

 

you just have to go with 4k, 4k, 4k, raytracing and DLSS... there isn't really much else, and the latter two are kind of "innovative" I guess.

 

Oh that's what it is? That's cool. Pretty sure Crossout and Subnautica also have that.

[tikker]

59 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

yeah... honestly it doesn't do much outside of the russian level from what Ive seen but it does look nice there (maybe other snowy areas too, geothermal valley possibly too)

 

 

ps: of course this could have been added later, but it doesn't use RTX afaik.

 

you just have to go with 4k, 4k, 4k, raytracing and DLSS... there isn't really much else, and the latter two are kind of "innovative" I guess.

 

Screen-space reflections (SSR) are a bit different from real-time ray tracing like RTX. The key words are, unsurprisingly, "screen-space" meaning it can only work with what is currently on screen. It renders the scene and then determines reflections based on what is visible. RTX, for example, does the full scene. In practise what this means is that with SSR you cannot see reflections of things that are not on the screen. JayzTwoCents' Battlefield V video illustrates that (timestamped):

As soon as an object no longer exists on the screen, its reflections cease to exist as well.

50 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

you dont need RTX for raytracing...? its just computational intensive,  but something like a 1080ti supports it and can do it,  at ~30fps, probably...

Control let me turn on ray tracing through DXR and my 1080 Ti got me a whopping 3 FPS at 1080p. Ray tracing itself isn't new by any means, just computationally very expensive as you say. RTX is "simply" (don't get me wrong, it's still amazing that we have it) Nvidia's hardware-accelerated implementation that brings you real-time ray tracing at an acceptable frame rate.

[porina]

18 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

you dont need RTX for raytracing...? its just computational intensive,  but something like a 1080ti supports it and can do it,  at ~30fps, probably...

I get where you're coming from, but from a gamer perspective there is an implied quality and performance expectation that needs to be met, that essentially can't be met before RTX existed. Tech demos don't exactly cut it.

 

18 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

its actually shadows and reflections in ROTTR (they count shadows as reflections apparently)  but isn't that what RTX does also? There is no "full raytracing experience" as far im concerned,  with very few exceptions.

If you count screen space reflections as ray tracing, then pretty much every modern AAA game supports it, and have done going back many many years, even before 2015. It is a good trick but with significant limitations. If the thing you want a reflection of is not on screen, it doesn't work. You can't use those reflections to see behind things you can't already see. For performance you might only "reflect" some things but not all things.

 

I suppose what I'd define as the full RT experience would be a combination of global illumination with surface reflections taken into consideration - beyond what SSR can provide. I wouldn't want to be a AAA game dev having to make games work both with and without RTX at the moment. For sure, you can get impressive lighting effects without RTX and even do a hybrid for performance reasons.

 

The technology still isn't quite there yet for high performance RT and it will take some time for more games to better support it. We might not get full benefit from it until such a time RT hardware is sufficiently in the market that devs start making it mandatory for high end games. We're probably some way off that, maybe several years or so. When I looked at the Feb. 2022 Steam Hardware Survey, 33% of nvidia GPUs in use were RTX models. If you dilute it with AMD that drops to 29% (ignoring Intel and others). All GPUs of current generation support it, and give it at least one more for older GPUs to cycle through.

 

The digitalfoundary video on Metro Exodus Enhance Edition goes into game lighting techniques in nice detail, comparing it to the older version without RT.

[Mark Kaine]

23 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

Oh that's what it is? That's cool. Pretty sure Crossout and Subnautica also have that.

yup... i mean i think it pretty sophisticated in ROTTR, but as i said (hinted at) there have been much earlier games to use "ray tracing" and in real time, because otherwise how do you do it in a game (also these games are typically very crude due to the computational costs)

 

Its funny to me how everyone seems to kinda think Nvidia "invented" it, google playing along with it too lol, when that isn't the case... I'm pretty sure that was a thing already especially during the 90s (although it wasn't very popular,  more like a gimmick) 

 

 

doesn't say anywhere games couldn't and didn't do it , just that it was "less suited". = )

 

Also found these gems (not sure if its just devs joking around though  lol)

 

 

 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

 

[porina]

15 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Its funny to me how everyone seems to kinda think Nvidia "invented" it

Do people really think that? There's a big difference between the concept, and delivering consumer affordable hardware capable of implementing it at a usable performance level. 

[Mark Kaine]

5 minutes ago, porina said:

I get where you're coming from, but from a gamer perspective there is an implied quality and performance expectation that needs to be met, that essentially can't be met before RTX existed. Tech demos don't exactly cut it.

Well, Nvidia was the first to have hardware support for raytracing on the card, that *is* an innovation,  but the tech itself isn't really much different... case in point,  i think raytracing looks better / more natural in ROTTR than in any "RTX" enabled game ive seen, where it typically just looks "shiny" (and kinda unrealistic when dry streets looks wet for example...) I made some comparisons with it on and off in ROTTR, but i have to find the pics... (oof)

 

But yeah,  it never went anywhere really,  except a few games in the 90s, early 2000s had it iirc (cant remember for the life of me which though and google is no help at all... *grumbles*)

  but mostly it was just tech demos yeah , i wouldn't really know as i was a hardcore consolero back then and thought pc games generally look "shit" : p

 

17 minutes ago, porina said:

suppose what I'd define as the full RT experience would be a combination of global illumination with surface reflections taken into consideration - beyond what SSR can provide

well to me full raytracing would be *everything* is made by raytracing at AAAA visual fidelity,  ie it would need to blow me away, which current "RTX" really doesn't,  i just turn it off at the earliest opportunity...

 

We're like 20 years away from that still, and by then their might be better options,  like "qbit tracing" or what ever buzzword they can come up with.

 

 

[dilpickle]

Ray tracing has been around for as long as computer graphics has.

[Mark Kaine]

24 minutes ago, porina said:

Do people really think that? There's a big difference between the concept, and delivering consumer affordable hardware capable of implementing it at a usable performance level. 

yeah, it seems to me most of the time at least. i don't think people realize it's just shadows, reflections etc, typically.

 

they also wouldn't know older cards are perfectly capable of raytracing (just needs a well optimized  game, such as ... ROTTR!)

 

ps: also you're right, performance plays a role, but reality is a lot of people really just play on 720p screens etc still, and 30fps is kind of ok to them, those are the real heroes to me : D (no seriously,  it just shows they actually care about the games imo)

 

22 minutes ago, dilpickle said:

Ray tracing has been around for as long as computer graphics has.

yep, but the distinction we're making is "real time" as in games, not film etc...

 

do you know any older games that used it? as i said im pretty sure there are some... (including "real time tech demos")

[porina]

15 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

i think raytracing looks better / more natural in ROTTR than in any "RTX" enabled game ive seen, where it typically just looks "shiny" (and kinda unrealistic when dry streets looks wet for example...)

Some of the early RTX games did turn it up to 11, but I feel devs have calmed down since then and are more subtle in their usage.

 

I'd still not consider ROTTR SSR to be called RT in the modern context. It is a nice trick for a specific usage case but not enough in itself.

 

15 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

well to me full raytracing would be *everything* is made by raytracing at AAAA visual fidelity,  ie it would need to blow me away, which current "RTX" really doesn't,  i just turn it off at the earliest opportunity...

The games I have supporting it default it to off, presumably as they balance more for performance. I also don't play any of those games, since I'm still waiting for something in the genres I'm interested in to use it.

 

15 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

their might be better options,  like "qbit tracing" or what ever buzzword they can come up with.

Quantum photon tracing! It is a physics thing that an individual photon could exist anywhere and everywhere in the universe on its way from one place to another. But I think we can settle for rays than individual photons. 

 

8 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

ps: also you're right, performance plays a role, but reality is a lot of people really just play on 720p screens etc still, and 30fps is kind of ok to them, those are the real heroes to me : D (no seriously,  it just shows they actually care about the games imo)

The retro and indie scenes certainly exist, but I'm thinking for high end visuals the bar will constantly go up. At some point momentum will mean there will be enough RT GPUs out there compared to non-RT ones, and I can see devs switching over to it. You might say you lose the non-RT base, but offsetting that is you no longer have to make two versions of the game environments and save on some dev cost.

[Mark Kaine]

34 minutes ago, porina said:

Quantum photon tracing!

That sounds awesome! where can i get it???! ; )

 

 

34 minutes ago, porina said:

I'd still not consider ROTTR SSR to be called RT in the modern context. It is a nice trick for a specific usage case but not enough in itself.

well idk what the actual differences are, to me it seems to be "real" raytracing though and kinda impressive to do it without RTX.

 

"Screen Space Reflections

On, Off

This setting determines whether or not the game will attempt to use ray tracing (produce reflections on water and other reflective surfaces) when it needs to. This can get pretty expensive for things like water, but most of the time it's not too big of a deal.

We don't think it's the end of the world if you turn it off, but it does look awfully nice when you notice it. If you can spare a few frames, we say keep it enabled."

 

Also it really does exactly *nothing* in some levels... but where it does it looks great while being pretty subtle,  which I actually like. 

 

34 minutes ago, porina said:

The retro and indie scenes certainly exist, but I'm thinking for high end visuals the bar will constantly go up

i mean sure, but , and that was a revelation to me, most people on my steam fl play actually stuff like  "left 4 dead" , half life, counter strike,  and just really older games typically,  and they often post low res screenshots too,  and those guys seem to be the most active ones also...

 

34 minutes ago, porina said:

At some point momentum will mean there will be enough RT GPUs out there compared to non-RT ones

i just think the bigger deal is these cards just being more powerful overall,  sure rtx is a bonus,  but its also simply a marketing vehicle,  you need *something* to sell new cards, imo DLSS is a bigger deal, but that also depends on the games, ive seen some pretty awful implementations already  (Nioh 2 for example) 

 

Ideally rtx+dlss make a good combo, the games a bit more shiny and you still get high frames (but actual games that do that successfully are probably still pretty rare)

 

but also i ageee, rtx will evolve,  maybe they get some actual cool *new* ideas as well... just making stuff look wet isnt it imho. = )