• Canadian_Cabinet @lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    126
    ·
    1 year ago

    Unirronically I agree with this. I still have yet to see a use case of ray tracing that makes it worth the 50% hit in fps.

    • schema@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      61
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      A lot of the implications for ray tracing are on the dev-side of things. It’s a bit hard to explain without going into technical details.

      Essentially, getting light to look “right” is very very hard. To do it, devs employ a lot of different techniques. One of those older techniques is baking the light on static objects, essentially pre-rendering where light goes and how it bounces. This has been done for a long time, e.g. even in Half-Life, the lights are baked for static geometry. So in a way, we have been using ray-tracing in games for a long time. however, it isn’t real time ray-tracing, as the information gets stored in light map textures, so there is no performance impact other than storing the texture in RAM/VRAM and drawing the texture together with others.

      The inherit problem of that technique is that it only really works for static geometry. If you move your light or any objects in the scene, your lightmaps will no longer match. To solve this, there are mixed modes which use real-time lights, dynamic light maps, and other tricks. However, these are often subject to problems and/or the limitations of using real-time lights. Real-time light problems are: You can only do a limited number before getting a serious performance impact, especially if the lights produce shadows. Soft shadows, shadows in big areas, and very detailed shadows are extremely hard to do as well without some advanced tricks. Also, ambient occlusion and global illumination is not something you can just give lights (there is screen-space GI and AO, but they don’t look good in all circumstances, and you have limited control. There are also some other techniques some engines did for real time GI.).

      Also there is the problem of baked light affecting dynamic objects, such as characters. This has been solved by baking so called “light probes”. These are invisible spheres that store the light data and the closest data then gets applied to the characters and other dynamic objects. This again has a some problem, as it’s hard to apply multiple light probes to the same object, so lighting might be off. Also, light direction is not accurate, which causes normal maps to look very flat in this light, and local shadows do not work using light probes. The same is done for reflections using reflection probes which are static. These are 360° “screen shots” essentially storing the reflection at that point in space. This however costs DiskSpace/RAM/VRAM, and it will not hold any information for moving objects (that’s why sometimes you can’t see yourself in the mirror in games). Also, the reflections sometimes look “out of place” or distorted when the reflection probe is too far from the reflecting surface (again, these cost VRAM and RAM so you don’t want to place them in front of every single reflective surface). It costs a lot of time to find the right balance. For the rest, usually screen space reflections are used, as any other real-time reflection is extremely costly as you essentially render the whole scene again for each local reflection. Screen space reflection is an advanced technique that works very well for stuff like reflective floors, but you will quickly see its downsides on very mirrored surfaces as it lacks information that is not on the screen. Some games like Hitman for example use the mix of those techniques extremely well.

      Coming back to lighting, there are now better techniques used for example by unreal and some other engines (and now unity in experimental). The light gets stored in more predictable data structures, such as 3d textures. This way, you can store the direction of all light in each cell. The light then gets applied to the objects passing through those cells. This looks pretty good, and the runtime cost is fairly low, but the storage cost of such textures is a tradeoff of texture resolution and fidelity. These textures cost a lot of VRAM to store and without using advanced techniques and tricks, have their own limits (e.g. for scene size). It also costs a lot of time to create each time you change the scene, and it also doesn’t eliminate all problems mentioned above, like reflections, moving lights, etc.

      Specifically, there is the problem of character lighting itself. Using light probes on characters usually looks pretty bad, as it removes a lot of detail of advanced skin shaders. Even with the above mentioned techniques, character lighting is still extremely hard to do. There is also some other problems, like ambient shadow in already shadowed areas, and light balancing for character versus scene lighting.

      For that reason, most AAA games use separate light rigs for characters. Essentially floating lights that ONLY affect the character and move with them. When the mixing with the scene lights is done right, the rig adapts to the current situation in terms of light direction, color, and intensity. If you look in most AAA games, you can often see situations where rim-light comes from a direction where there is no actual light source. However, this way, the devs and artists have full control over lighting the characters. Essentially like a real movie production would have, but without the limitation of the real world.

      Now, ray-tracing as you know it right now is not quite there yet, but eventually, ray tracing is the solution to a lot of the problems mentioned above. Things like polygon density, light count, global illumination, ambient occlusion, light direction, reflections, and much more are simply “there” for you to use. Now this doesn’t mean that it will automatically make everything look great, but with the overwhelming amount of different tricks that have to be used for current gen games to make the look good, it opens a whole new world of possibilities.

      Also, something that will not directly influence the final game, it will eventually simplify things for devs so that more time can be invested into other things.

      At this current usage of ray-tracing, it’s more like a gimmick, because devs will still focus most resources on the current ways to use light. This is because most people don’t have cards with sufficient ray-tracing capabilities. So for the moment, I agree that the performance hit is not worth it. However, eventually it might become the default way to draw games. While we are not quite there, in terms of performance, I think that things might become a lot more consistent and predictable eventually for raytracing.

      • Juki@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        1 year ago

        YES, thank you! You saved me a lot of writing haha

        This is spot on and the real advantage of ray tracing - when it becomes the norm it’ll look better, provide effects that are extremely difficult or impossible and do so with minimal dev pain.

      • ClamDrinker@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Awesome and great explanation for a layperson. Because the industry has been faking lighting for so long and lighting is quite important, the industry has become incredibly good at it. But it also takes a lot of development time that could be spent on adding more content or features. There’s a reason the opinion about ray tracing is extremely positive within the game development industry. But also nobody’s expecting it to become the norm over night, and the period with hybrid support for both raytracing and legacy lighting is only just starting.

      • QueriesQueried@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Worth mentioning that we’re also about halfway on the average time for these big features to hit significant saturation, like with PhysX. It’s pretty common for a GPU (and sometimes CPU/Chip set) to take 3-4 generations to trickle down enough through new products and used product sales to have decent enough depth/usage. At this point depending on how Apple is handling ray tracing, they might slow down the transition away from rasterized.

    • Vqhm@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      46
      ·
      1 year ago

      Remember PhysX back when it was a separate
      card Physics Processing Unit before they shoved it on the GPU before they even had multithreading? Yea it evolved. But the original implementation was not ideal.

        • Hexarei@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Honestly all of the “it runs badly even on a 4090” stuff is talking about 4K with all the settings maxed - It runs at a solid minimum 30 for me at 1440p on my 3080 at nearly ultra settings. As long as you’re not expecting 60FPS at 4K, you can enable RT overdrive on affordable hardware.

    • Tau@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      16
      ·
      1 year ago

      Raytracing is good but the problem is that were are in a transitional period (and Nvidia keeps upselling it’s products)

    • Fades@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I haven’t personally experienced a game that made use of it, so it must not exist

      This u?

    • BigDaddySlim@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yup, I have a 3090 and even then I don’t bother with RTX. It’s a gimmick Jensen and Nvidia love to push as a must have feature. In reality you don’t notice it if you’re playing a game normally, it’s a “stop and smell the roses” feature you only turn on to check out once and turn off immediately when you get frame dips.

      • ThunderingJerboa@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        1 year ago

        How can you implement anything meaningful with ray tracing when shocker, not everyone can use ray tracing. Games are unfortunately designed for the median crowd. I would argue maybe the next console generation shall be that point when ray tracing is the norm. We have seen this fairly recently with SSDs, where they floated around for nearly 10-14 years in the consumer market being a cool piece of tech but most games were being designed for a hard disk except now most consoles have SSDs as the base standard, so this means the game can be designed around that specification and take advantage of it. Even though I am a PC stan, I understand consoles have a huge impact on the gaming industry.

      • Holzkohlen@feddit.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        That is why they came up with DLSS and then the frame generation. But of course it’s proprietary tech confined to the newest most expensive cards by Nvidia. Utterly useless

        • ThunderingJerboa@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          Are we going to ignore FSR and XESS probably wouldn’t have existed without this push? Like even if you don’t use Ray tracing I think its fair to say you can benefit from DLSS (even though one can argue its a cheap gimmick to raise your fps count) but having it as an option is a good thing.

          • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            7
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Frame interpolation is still a weird one to me.

            Like, with how the latency is obviously still tied to the base framerate, and the fact that lower framerates mean less information to calculate good interpolated frames from…

            Basically, the tech is at its worst for low-end hardware that needs it the most. (Which is probably why they chose to restrict it to new models, now that I think about it)

            A 4090 owner turning on DLSS3 is kinda like a dental surgeon getting a third car for their birthday.

            Upscaling has come a long way though, and the anti-aliasing they use in DLSS is so good, they’ve released it as a standalone feature. That I can appreciate, anything is better than what some games do with TAA.

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The problem with raytracing is that it’s real strengths are in places where traditional rendering doesn’t work at all. As soon as raytraced games stop needing a rasterized option, raytracing will really become useful. Most of it’s advantages are around dynamic scenes where you can’t just bake the lighting, or reflections which without raytracing will break if you look at them slightly wrong.

      Edit: Most of the minecraft raytracing implementations are lacking in my opinion, but minecraft is a game that is well suited for raytracing. Really just anything with a dynamic world.

    • CopernicusQwark@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      Spider-Man 2 has launched with ray tracing always on and looks and plays phenomenally. Super immersive to swing around the city and have proper reflections off all the skyscrapers!

  • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    80
    ·
    1 year ago

    Getting the vibe that OP is being serious while using a template supposed to be ironic.

    Seems odd to be angry about game graphics progressing. Imagine how it was during the 90s.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      1 year ago

      And if they are serious it doesn’t make sense, ray tracing, path tracing, global illumination, make a game leaps and bounds more enjoyable for me. Realistic lighting is everything, I cannot wait for the day they finally get the new global illumination system in star citizen…

        • Pixelologist@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Do you have a gpu that can run max raytracing at 1440p - 100+ fps?

          I’m not saying it’s a worthwile investment, but if you CAN run it well… you’re going to.

          • avater@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Yes I did, still choosed to run games without raytracing on ultra without any upscale. Of course I did notice some (imho!) minor nice lighting and refraction stuff with raytracing, but for me these never justified the performance loss and the soft look of an upscaled image.

            Therefore I’d rather choose not to play with raytracing and I don’t have the feeling that I miss something :)

        • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          1 year ago

          The biggest reason your not seeing much benefit is because a) the tech hasn’t matured to a point where rasterization techniques can’t produce the same effect and b) devs aren’t developing games with raytracing in mind.

          Honestly, the most impressive examples of raytracing have been Nvidias tech demos, more specifically Quake 2 RTX and Minecraft RTX textures.

          It’s gonna take time for raytracing to impress but when it does it’s going to blow your mind.

      • WldFyre@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        I cannot wait for the day they finally get the new global illumination system in star citizen

        It’ll happen right after server meshing!

      • UndercoverUlrikHD@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        I don’t know man, some people unironically thinks the earth is flat, that if a supernova happened in our galaxy the earth would blow up or that Volkswagen is pronounced with an English v and not with f despite listening to a German explain the German v. You can never tell when it comes to internet strangers.

        Most of the comments (at least when I opened the post) were talking about RT as if it all does is ruining performance and shouldn’t be used.

  • Gabu@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    77
    ·
    1 year ago

    This, but unironically. Games don’t even need such realistic graphics, anyway - I’d much rather play a stylized or even 2d game where the devs focused on mechanics and fun, rather than pretty lights.

    • Vuraniute@thelemmy.club
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      1 year ago

      Minecraft, ULTRAKILL, Undertale, Celeste

      all of them some of the best games in my opinion, how many use ray tracing? ZERO.

      • Cowbee@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Hollow Knight, Crosscode, Hades, Dead Cells, Signalis, Dusk, Outer Wilds, Underrail, and more are all great examples of relatively modern games that kill it in the graphical department without using anything fancy.

        Edit, because this is fun: Boltgun, Sea of Stars, the Bloodborne PS1 demake, Tunic, and more.

      • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Minecraft shaders look great though, especially the rtx one for bedrock. If it was more open source, I’m sure ray tracing would be great to implement into shaders.

      • Jack3G@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Celeste still has really nice lighting in places, imo, but you are right, it all just comes from good colour choice and artistic skill, not some premade graphics option that they flipped on.

    • Zekas@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      25
      ·
      1 year ago

      Garbage take. Few things are truly needed outside of the game being enjoyable and “good” graphics can absolutely be something contributing to that. For some good is pixel graphics, for others it’s near realism. You don’t get to decide for anyone but you.

      • Moneo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yup. Currently I’m on the indie hype train, but games like The Witcher and Red Dead are also very fun and benefit from good graphics.

    • SchizoDenji@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 year ago

      Half of the shit that is praised today are basically subpar rendered movies with little gameplay elements.

      Might aswell play a visual novel and atleast get a good story instead.

  • lorty@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    64
    ·
    1 year ago

    Don’t worry bro just turn on fake frames and upscaling. Now we get shitty graphics AND raytracing at the same time!

  • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    50
    ·
    1 year ago

    The weird hybrid solutions that game devs are coming up with to beat out the old tech without doing full RTX is awesome. And for that reason I like RTX, because its pushing development of ideas that work better for today’s hardware and today’s applications.

      • Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Nvidia is succeeding (in business) by being cunts, In don’t know if they will ever not be cunts. 😂

        But you can still buy freesync and g sync monitors, however it seems freesync won that battle. It’ll be a matter of time.

        • miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Don’t even get me started on adaptive sync. New Gsync monitors are finally capable to run VRR with AMD gpus now. Why do they bother still making them, then?

  • GTG3000@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    1 year ago

    After playing Portal RTX and Quake 2 RTX, my opinion is that what we really need are games that fully embrace RTX as their rendering. Lower poly count, use materials more, lean in onto the cool lighting.

    Games like Cyberpunk 2077 use RTX, but it’s just painted over so it is very expensive for what it brings to the table. Sure it’s more accurate and having reflections is neat, but it costs more than some shadow maps and doesn’t beat good artistic design.

    • UsernameIsTooLon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yea were still in that transition period. One of the other problems is having RTX requirements only. Eventually the GTX cards will have to die out in order for this to be achieved though.

      • GTG3000@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, we will only start seeing games that fully rely on raytracing when low-mid tier GPUs will be able to support at least current day RTX 3070 performance. As in, you can do better but at least you can run stuff fully in raytracing.

    • Tbird83ii@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      RTX in Spider-Man/Miles Morales on PC was… Amazing.

      Being able to see yourself swinging by windows in realtime, shadows from buildings…

      It was worth the FPS hit.

      • GTG3000@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        You know, that’s fair. Most of my experience with RTX in games so far been in first person shooters and they’re kind of lacking in environments like those.

        Mostly stuff like slightly better lighting in Cyberpunk or the flickery caustics in recent Robocop game. Bonus points for the games that implement RTX reflections and shadows but don’t have your character reflect or cast a shadow.

  • Guntrigger@feddit.ch
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    1 year ago

    This feels like one of those “VR in the 90s was shit so we should never develop VR” kind of things.

    • It’s really moreso that raytracing nowadays is intensely poorly implemented when there is usually better ways to go about it.

      We have the means to be efficient about our graphics. But instead we go about it in the most unoptimized ways imaginable

      • Guntrigger@feddit.ch
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        That’s exactly my point. Raytracing is being shoehorned into things without them being optimised specifically for it at the moment. That doesn’t mean we should stop developing the tech entirely because people are implementing it poorly most of the time.

        • Trollception@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          How do you "optimize’ it? You would think with so many game companies using it that if there was a better way than there would be at least one title with optimized ray tracing. The issue is the computational requirements for convincing ray tracing. When Toy Story 1 was rendered originally it took 45 minutes to 3 hours to render a single frame of video. Give it time and the GPUs will eventually be fast enough. Baby steps with new tech.

          • Guntrigger@feddit.ch
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 year ago

            Optimization is not an on/off switch. All companies are optimising their implementation to the best of their ability/budget. As coders get more familiar with the tech and it becomes more commonplace, as well as work being done by graphics card companies on their drivers, it will reduce the computational requirements over time. There’s a hell of a lot of work that goes into graphical processing on hardware, software, engine and game levels to make things look better for less computations, it’s not just “tell GPU to do simulate every particle from the sun”.

            • There’s also the other side of the issue. As tech gets better, devs are less incentivised to optimise their crap. Which leads to games that look and function the same as older games, but are now bloated beyond belief.

              It’s a strange paradox of tech innovation. The more powerful our tech becomes, the less we feel like properly utilizing said tech.

      • theangryseal@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        1 year ago

        When I got my oculus quest I played it as often as possible. That’s the problem though, it just doesn’t make sense to play it almost ever.

        If I were a teenager or someone who lived alone I could really get into it. The problem is disconnecting entirely from everyone around me for a game.

        With my Steam Deck or my Switch, I can put my kid on my lap and play. I can sit it down easily and help my wife with a chore. I can walk around at work in my downtime and play.

        VR is awesome. I absolutely love it. I just don’t have time to fuck with it. I would imagine that’s the case for most people.

        • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          I have two kids and very little gaming time, but more than 75% of that time I spend in VR. With the increased immersion/escapism I have completely abandoned desktop gaming. Playing FPS on desktop just feels silly now

          • theangryseal@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 year ago

            I guess it really depends on lifestyle and career and age of children and all that.

            I get really stressed when I disengage from my family for too long and can’t see what’s going on around me.

            I’ve played VR at work. It’s fine for single player games where I can pause and come back. Multiplayer games get really frustrating though when every 5 minutes you’re being pulled out and you can’t just jump back in.

            I love VR. I just can’t seem to find the time to fully immerse and escape.

            I agree with you on shooters. I am insanely good at Pavlov and when I jump into something else (non vr) it just feels so restrained. Moving around and actually feeling like you’re firing your weapon is a big deal. I’d like to get something to attach my controllers to at some point with some weight so it feels even better.

            • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 year ago

              Yeah my play sessions are usually when everyone is in bed so cutting myself off from other humans isn’t an issue! Looking at my backlog of games that require longer sessions and it’s just not gonna happen with my current lifestyle.

              A few years back when I had more time I messed around in Skyrim with a controller taped to a weighty staff. Managed to get it lined up perfectly in game and the trigger was usable. Using phones as motion sensors so I could walk without using a second controller. And voice control spells. That shit was crazy fun, and obviously incredibly dangerous heh. Can’t wait till VR is mainstream and we get more cool controller hardware.

              • gnygnygny@lemm.ee
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                I am son disappointed that 3D TV is dead. For few movies or documentaries it was brilliant. Exploring a prehistoric cave for example. Hopefully we still can play 3D with VR

          • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Same here, it’s just a great evolution of gaming. 2D gaming is actually starting to feel obsolete the more I play VR.

            I too have a family and a job and lots of things to do, and I still find time to do the cool stuff I want to do like VR. The “isolation” that the other person is talking about is not an issue for me because I can stay aware of people around me with my ears and stuff.

      • Guntrigger@feddit.ch
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        3D cinema is more like light gun games. Kinda cool but it doesn’t really advance anything.

        Man, now I’ve said that I miss the old Namco arcades.

    • Gladaed@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      Correct. This meme templates is a unreasonable Statement paired with outdated arguments and modern images/facts poking fun at idiots. It also commonly confounds the reason for the thing with something easily observable.

      • Guntrigger@feddit.ch
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        It’s expensive, but a high end rig with a good headset (index or vive), it’s pretty great.

  • Zacryon@feddit.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    1 year ago

    Raytracing produces realistic visual effects without requiring tricks like ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, shadow resolution and so on, since those emerge as a result of raytracing anyway and are much more realistic. I’m currently rendering a Donut in Blender where the effects are clearly visible in comparison.

    However, due to the high amount of optimization in visually impressive realtime rendering engines like game engines, I agree with you that I don’t see many benefits comparing ray tracing in games with contemporary alternative techniques.

    Nevertheless I think that’s the future. In the long run, there’s nothing better, i.e. more accurate, than simulating the behavior of light when it comes to visual realism.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      32
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Also, baked lighting has another cost - nothing that is baked can be dynamic, and it has to be done during development, so it takes up dev resources.

      Raytraced stuff happens immediately without tricks. All you need is the geometry and the materials to be accurate, and it should look right, no questions asked.

      Once we get to a point where raytracing can be assumed even for low end systems, the problem where systems can’t run certain games could become a thing of the past. I mean, if manufacturers weren’t constantly bombarding us with planned & perceived obsolescence.

      • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        in the case where you have vehicles with explorable interiors (like the ships in Star Citizen), lighting has to be dynamic because lighting conditions change just as a result of flying around normally. The position of the sun in whichever of the two (current) star systems you’re in relative to your ship, and the atmosphere which may or may not be present outside, the position of cargo and objects/materials that will be receiving light and causing it to diffuse onto surrounding surfaces in a cabin also requires at least some kind of reference or it just feels BAD.

        But the recent citizencon engine presentation showed some AMAZING new short cuts that give just enough visual fidelity without tanking the framerate that it scratches some kind of itch DEEP within the predictive modeling of the human mind… when light acts more like it’s supposed to, it’s fucking magical.

  • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    1 year ago

    I’m surprised they didn’t go with the fact that ray tracing shoots rays out of the camera rather than having light radiate from light sources.

    “That’s a scientifically outdated view of how light works! Light enters your eyes, not the other way around! What is this? Emission theory? Are we back in the 1600s? They’ve played us for absolute fools.”

    • Pulptastic@midwest.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      That’s clever. Only trace the rays that the camera can see and probably cheaper to send some rays from the camera to the sun than vice versa.

      • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        Exactly ! this makes the problem potentially millions of times easier, since you know with certainty that every ray fired is going to contribute to the image, whereas firing rays from the light source would guarantee you never see most of them, the processing power is wasted and your image never converges

  • DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    1 year ago

    Counterpoint: I like pretty lights and don’t mind having to play at a suboptimal framerate if it means more detail that I’m going to notice and enjoy.

    Also, I keep seeing people confusing photorealism with a lack of style, when that’s just not true. Pixar movies for example are photorealistic but stylized. You can have fancy lights and cool styles.

    • jomoo99@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      I disagree that pixar movies are photorealistic… They’re pretty solidly on the cartoon side of things

      • Trollception@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        14
        ·
        1 year ago

        Pixar movies have accurate lighting which makes them look great. Lighting separates a good looking game from a great looking game and is more important than textures imo.

    • RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Main point aside, that isn’t photorealism tho. Photorealism is depicting something almost identical to a real life photograph or simply what most consider realistic graphics.

      • DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        I would consider photorealism to mainly be light-based (prefix photo meaning light), but I get what you mean. I’d consider photorealism and realism to be separate. “I can see that existing” vs “I can see myself being there”

        A better example probably would’ve been claymation, or pokemon concierge.

        Edit: my definition of photorealism might be off.

        • RogueBanana@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          Yeah I got your point but pretty sure photo in photorealism is just photograph. Not sure if there are any term like that for realistic lighting tho.

  • Smorty [she/her]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    33
    ·
    1 year ago

    Eh, pathtracing is pretty cool, and when used correctly, it can lead to real amazing results, while the artist does not have to care about performance as much. Baked lighting is very nice for static scenes, but it also consumes a lot of storage.

    • insomniac_lemon@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Godot’s SDFGI seems like a good tradeoff, particularly as it works well on not-super-new GPUs (Juan: “but you can run them great on something old, like an gtx960 or a rx450 and get pretty real-time lighting at 1080”).

      It’s brilliant.

      • Smorty [she/her]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Sdfgi is pretty cool, (I develope with Godot), but for now it’s still really hard to figure out the right settings for it to not be a gigant splat fest… Cuz it leaves splats of color all around the place. Outside scenes work a lot better though, so that’s cool.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        It’s not really that dynamic yet though, but I looked at their presentation where they talked about future features and they said that support for dynamic objects will be coming. I’m pretty excited about where its going.

        They originally planned to get the improvements out in 4.1 but it looks like they haven’t gotten around to it yet. https://github.com/orgs/godotengine/projects/33/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=12571576

    • Bappity@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      cyberpunk has a path tracing setting and it gives me even worse performance than ray tracing 😭

  • nickiam2@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    1 year ago

    To be fair, lighting is the most important part of generating photorealistic graphics. Having realistic and real-time lighting makes it look so much more realistic

    • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      photorealistic … realistic … real-time … more realistic …

      We had a tool for that: it was called IMAGINATION

      The graphical fidelity fetish has complete ruined gamers’ ability to immerse themselves in make believe worlds without the game doing all the work for us

      My tone is /s, but despite my hypocrisy I do believe this is half true

      • overjustic@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        1 year ago

        Its not like games that tried to be realistic before didn’t exist and not like games that purposely go for a non realistic style now are not a thing. I’m pretty sure we have more pixel style graphics games coming out now yearly than when they were actually a thing.

        • Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          We have more indie pixel games coming out yearly than all of the original consoles put together during their lifetime I’m pretty sure.

          • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            I wouldn’t be surprised. You probably have young people making games that have nostalgia for games made in the style of 8bit, more than the games that were made that way because of tech constraints.

    • WindowsEnjoyer@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      “Fake it till you make it”. Using various techniques it is possible to simulate a fake ray tracing. It doesn’t need to look as real as in real life, just similar enough so you wouldn’t notice during gameplay.

      AI frame gen and AI upscaling is what I am most excited about…

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I met Ray back at a comiccon in '99. Really down to earth but very bright guy. No room for any disrespect, and his wife Judy is a gem too.

  • HRDS_654@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    20
    ·
    1 year ago

    Counter, or maybe side, argument; the problem is that nobody has actually done it well. There is a very real difference to be made using real time pathtracing, but everyone is distracted by pretty lights.

      • 📛Maven@lemmy.sdf.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        Is it a bit vague?

        Ultimately, ray tracing was used for most graphics elements, allowing for more realistic lighting.

        [Reviewers cited] its use of ray tracing

        Source article: “Ray tracing is so crucial to Teardown that the world goes black if you turn it off”

        I think it’s pretty clear, tbh.

        • LapGoat@pawb.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          ah yeah there ya go, twas used for lighting, which we were trying to find an example of other stuff.

          oh well.