Ray tracing

[Ergroilnin]

So umm...

 

I will be completely honest, I am totally new to this whole ray tracing stuff and while the little of what I could see in trailers and some basic info on the web did make me smarter, I still cannot answer this one for myself.

 

Can the ray tracing tech be included backwards in the current triple A games, or do we have to wait for new engines and games build around this feature?

 

As in, should I hold my breath to see I don't know, FFXV for example, getting an update, which will allow it to use the ray tracing cores on new TRX series, or will I have to wait for newer games to show up with the tech already included from the get to?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Games have to be remade with newer versions of the engine mostly.

[Angel102]

some titles can be retrofitted it seems, but now that the technology is starting to become available at a consumer level it will definitely be a case of newer games being made with it specifically in mind.

[GoodBytes]

Games needs to have its code updated to support Ray Tracing.

Doing ray tracing in code is not a 1 liner or something, but DirectX 12 offers things to help. I don't know if Nvidia added things, nor if Vulkhan has, I didn't check (probably does).

Anyway, the good news is that it can be patched in. It doesn't require a full recode of the game.

 

That said, you need to have developers wanting to, including their publishers. If they see it will not push sales of currently released games (or Nvidia/Microsoft is not willing to pay for it), then they won't do it. But maybe be there in their next game.

[Mira Yurizaki]

The only thing I hope is that the RT Cores can be repurposed. But I have no idea what makes those cores tick. I know Tensor Cores are just NVIDIA lingo for hardware matrix multipliers but I don't know what an RT core is. If the RT cores can be repurposed for older software, the good news is that would be more likely a driver fix.

[Jurrunio]

Why would you want raytracing in FFXV anyway? It's runs horrible enough, raytracing will just drag the already disappointing frame rates even lower.

[impure]

The way it appears to be working is that some polygons are being rendered using Raytracing rather than fragment shaders. So it's not a complete overhaul of the graphics pipeline like I expected. It's basically just a post processing step now and can be added like any other post processing effect. Which means it can be bolted on to an existing engine pretty easily.

 

That being said I would not expect it to come to many, if any, existing games because there's no profit incentive to do that.

 

And don't fall for the hype. Rasterization is almost as good as raytracing 99% of the time and runs significantly faster.

[GoodBytes]

17 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The only thing I hope is that the RT Cores can be repurposed. But I have no idea what makes those cores tick. I know Tensor Cores are just NVIDIA lingo for hardware matrix multipliers but I don't know what an RT core is. If the RT cores can be repurposed for older software, the good news is that would be more likely a driver fix.

Yea, we will need the details of the architecture to know. But I have a felling it is like float point support, dedicated hardware for the specific task. The downside of this is that it means that we will have warmer GPUs (more power consuming), and bigger chips. While the same is true for aforementioned float point support in a processor, float point support is very valuable and used in great number of things, even if you just web surf. As for ray tracing.. while for sure time will make this more efficient, smaller, and not noticeable, games needs to support it, and considering that ray tracing is not 1 single command type of thing like basic lighting model in OpenGL/DirectX, I don't see indie's use it (very very few), and even big titles, unless you are talking about the really big titles like your Call of Duty and so on, where there is a heavy importance in cinematic visuals, as opposed to Nintendo graphics style, which i doubt will really make things look better.

[GoodBytes]

10 hours ago, impure said:

The way it appears to be working is that some polygons are being rendered using Raytracing rather than fragment shaders. So it's not a complete overhaul of the graphics pipeline like I expected. It's basically just a post processing step now and can be added like any other post processing effect. Which means it can be bolted on to an existing engine pretty easily.

For sure it is a hybrid system, where like you said, you have basic (a few dots) Ray Tracing, and "AI" filling the missing spots (I highly doubt you have a real AI, and "AI" is used as a marketing word like 98% of things calming "AI" (I am sorry, but a bunch of 'if conditions', is not AI, it is an algorithm, at least in my book... but hey.. marketing!). It would be way to taxing to have full rays, and you'll need backward compatibility.  I expect over the years we will see GPU's that can do this with more and more rays, resulting in better image fidelity, and probably games would have a slider on how many rays you want it to do.

 

Quote

And don't fall for the hype. Rasterization is almost as good as raytracing 99% of the time and runs significantly faster.

Not really. It really looks good because you have "level" design where many things, like light, is known, or can be calculated, and textures or texture effects can be applied to emulate things. In the "game graphics" world, most of it is visuals tricks, mostly texture work, instead of shaders only, although, as hardware come more and more powerful, especially on PC, it is becoming less and less the case, but at the same time, many tricks are improved. For example, bump mapping:

Where, to be put is very simply: it is texture work (3 textures to be exact, where 1 is visuals, and the 2 others are information that is none visible directly, where its RGB values for each pixel will determine an angle and not an actual color, for GPU with to calculate things with it). Basically, you are playing with brightness/contrast on per pixel base, based on lighting position to create the sense of bumps on a surface. All this is less taxing than having the mass number of polygons needed to actually create texture. And when done right, with talented graphic artists and shader programmers, it can result in pretty convincing results, and not have the "wet look", as you normally have if you take some random simple algorithm online and quickly done texture, example:

 

 

[render]

This is the advent of consumer grade brainscale computing and human machine interface systems.

[JZStudios]

FFXV is going to have RTX, it was shown on their game wall of supported titles.

Any new titles moving forward that are aiming for higher visual fidelity should support it. As far as implementing it like backwards compatibility, yeah the engine would have to be updated. It's the same thing along the same lines as all of Nvidias other gameworks features. Looks like UE4 will be implementing it since that's what most of the demos and supported games so far are made in.

 

The raytracing seems to be really basic so far though, so maybe some games will come out with ridiculous max values for future proofing. While Nvidia has spent most of their time foaming their pants about reflections I'm more impressed by Metro's singular light source of the sun giving full global real time illumination. Having realistic interior lighting without any fake cube or lightmaps is pretty damn impressive. Honestly most of the reflections they've shown so far haven't even really been that great.