What an awesome piece of tech. I'm looking forward to playing the first games that use real time ray tracing.
Hasn’t that basically been vaporware since the early ‘90s? I’d love it if games weren’t just stripping all gameplay functionality in favor of “storytelling” first, because otherwise there’s no real point to even including more accurate lighting representations. For example, take a look at Hitman 2016. The game world is fairly gorgeous when it’s set up normally. But once you start interacting with it, you realize just how broken both the lighting engine and the mechanics are. We apparently have to (maybe not) use stopgap solutions to represent accurate lighting, such as “baking in” the surface “bounce” of lighting into the surfaces themselves. If you’re in a hallway and you shoot out a light, sure, the brightness of the hallway will go down. But if you shoot out ALL the lights, it doesn’t get dark. The “bounce” of all the lights that used to be there remains as a… what is it, the “UV map”?… on all the surfaces, and it looks like it’s just a cloudy day outside.
Real darkness in games–never mind the gameplay mechanics to take advantage of stealth in said darkness–is, for whatever reason, a very long way away. And developers don’t seem to care about it at all. It’s a real shame.
You're right it's all smoke and mirrors with current games and not hard to see through the matrix.
I watched the whole of Jensen Huang's keynote and it does seem like the age of vaporware might be coming to an end though. He showed real time raytracing for spinning industrial models/scenes at least, it remains to be seen how many fps a real game can get using this technology.
But just to have enough compute power to finally start modelling things properly (and therefore be on the path to photorealism) is exciting. Hopefully some new and interesting gameplay mechanics will follow!
It’s all in the optimisation. Even HD = 2Megapixels x 400Rays/pixel x 60FPS = 48GigaRays/second and some estimates say up to 10x that figure for noise reduction. They’re trying to use AI to create the optimisation algorithms which will improve drastically (look at how HEVC can discard 80-90% of data and still look good). Time to start rolling this out.
What an awesome piece of tech. I'm looking forward to playing the first games that use real time ray tracing.
Hasn’t that basically been vaporware since the early ‘90s? I’d love it if games weren’t just stripping all gameplay functionality in favor of “storytelling” first, because otherwise there’s no real point to even including more accurate lighting representations. For example, take a look at Hitman 2016. The game world is fairly gorgeous when it’s set up normally. But once you start interacting with it, you realize just how broken both the lighting engine and the mechanics are. We apparently have to (maybe not) use stopgap solutions to represent accurate lighting, such as “baking in” the surface “bounce” of lighting into the surfaces themselves. If you’re in a hallway and you shoot out a light, sure, the brightness of the hallway will go down. But if you shoot out ALL the lights, it doesn’t get dark. The “bounce” of all the lights that used to be there remains as a… what is it, the “UV map”?… on all the surfaces, and it looks like it’s just a cloudy day outside.
Real darkness in games–never mind the gameplay mechanics to take advantage of stealth in said darkness–is, for whatever reason, a very long way away. And developers don’t seem to care about it at all. It’s a real shame.
You're right it's all smoke and mirrors with current games and not hard to see through the matrix.
I watched the whole of Jensen Huang's keynote and it does seem like the age of vaporware might be coming to an end though. He showed real time raytracing for spinning industrial models/scenes at least, it remains to be seen how many fps a real game can get using this technology.
But just to have enough compute power to finally start modelling things properly (and therefore be on the path to photorealism) is exciting. Hopefully some new and interesting gameplay mechanics will follow!
It’s all in the optimisation. Even HD = 2Megapixels x 400Rays/pixel x 60FPS = 48GigaRays/second and some estimates say up to 10x that figure for noise reduction. They’re trying to use AI to create the optimisation algorithms which will improve drastically (look at how HEVC can discard 80-90% of data and still look good). Time to start rolling this out.
Yep so there's still a certian amount of smoke and mirrors but its automatic which should be more efficient than the current approach which requires a human artist to put fake light sources in certain scenes to make them look right. With the RT + AI approach I think shooting out all the lights would indeed cause darkness (to use tallest skil's example).
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