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Epic’s Stunning RTX-Powered Ray-Tracing Demo Wows GDC
- sagebird 8y agothe smoke that comes from the fairies is a bit deterministic for my tastes -- looks like it is being driven by a trigonometric function and doesn't have much turbulence or interaction with local environment/surfaces.
- _bxg1 8y agoThe main goal was to show off raytracing; advanced particle systems aren't a new thing.
- eps 8y agoNo wireless. Less space than Nomad. Lame. :)
- darkpuma 8y agocmdrtaco is wrongly maligned, the ipod would not become massively successful until further revisions were released.
- 0-_-0 8y agoDid they have wireless and more space than a Nomad?
- darkpuma 8y agoConnectivity (USB, rather than firewire) and more storage were certainly among the facets improved in subsequent versions. USB isn't wireless, but with USB rather than just firewire, the lack of wireless is less of a problem for mass market adoption, isn't it? I never had a nomad, I couldn't tell you how much storage they had, but I do know that my first ipod had a lot more than a measly 5GB; it was a 5th generation with 30GB. ipod sales were basically fuck-all until Gen 4/5, meaning cmdrtaco was basically right for three or so years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.sv... I don't think it a coincidence that Gen 4 and 5 were the first to fully support USB (gen 4 also supported firewire, gen 5 did not.) The iphone took 6 quarters to breach 5 million sales per quarter (remember that as it was originally released, the iphone was an impressive touch screen web browser with subpar data and no appstore!) The ipod took 14 quarters to breach 5 million sales per quarter. After that, both took off. My point here, is the ipod was much slower off the line than the iphone. Simply put, it was lame (until it wasn't.)
- cmdrtaco 8y agoThank you for setting the record straight!
- mikepurvis 8y agoAlicia Vikander credited at the end, presumably for the mocap and vocal performance? It's cool the amount of cross-over there this these days between high performers in different disciplines of media. How many Hollywood triple A stars would have been down to do mocap for a 90 second gaming tech demo video even ten years ago?
- sorenjan 8y agoAlso has music by Ludwig Göransson, who won an Oscar for the music in Black Panther. The video is made by a Swedish production company (Goodbye Kansas), and it's inspired by the art of John Bauer, one of the most recognized artists in Sweden, so maybe that helped getting the A-lists interested.
- izzydata 8y agoMaybe I'm crazy, but I don't feel the need for such realism in video games. Ray tracing is an awesome technology for things like pre-rendered video, but real time raytracing that takes up a huge portion of the graphics card computational power seems like a waste. I'd rather see more frames per second at higher resolutions.
- Crespyl 8y agoFrom discussions I've seen elsewhere and my own limited knowledge, I think a lot of the potential benefit in the near future is likely for the artists/designers more than the end users. Being able to quickly place lights and design materials for a scene with realistic ray-traced rendering gets believable results in simpler fashion than by having to painstakingly recreate all the details of natural lighting with existing conventional methods. It requires a lot more of the end-user hardware, but overall gives the artists more room to focus on things other than making sure the lighting and reflections aren't distractingly wrong.
- izzydata 8y agoThat sounds like a good application of this technology. If Nvidia had some kind of split product line for professionals and gamers. Kind of like this exact thing they already did with the Quadro cards..
- mattnewport 8y agoYou're missing the point, for realtime rendering it's not enough for the content creators to have this technology to get the benefits, it has to be used on the target end user hardware too. Getting things to look good with traditional rasterization based pipelines involves a lot of special case hacks and tricks and work arounds for situations where they break down or don't compose. That is a lot of work for the artists to accommodate the limitations of the target platform. The promise of raytracing is that you can get great results without a lot of tricks and special casing which frees up the content creators to focus on the visuals they want to create without worrying so much about technical implementation details. That only really works if the target platform supports performant ray tracing as well as the content creation tools.
- devilmoon 8y agoAm I missing something? This doesn't really seem all that great compared to what we have been shown with Ray Tracing. The fact that it's not even real time but pre-rendered makes it even less wow-ing for me
- zaroth 8y agoA visually stunning ray-tracing demo using Unreal Engine 4.22 and powered by a single GeForce RTX 2080 Ti... Does this not mean it’s rendered in real-time? Otherwise what’s the point in mentioning it rendered with a single card [in an unspecified time frame]?
- devilmoon 8y agoI don't know, there doesn't seem to be any mention either way, if it's not pre-rendered it is slightly better but still, I don't understand why a packed room at GDC of all places would be wowed by this.
- VectorLock 8y agoI think that it uses Unreal Engine entails that its rendered in real-time.
- MrGilbert 8y ago"a real-time technology demonstration using Unreal Engine 4.22 ray tracing" Directly from the description of the video at Unreal's yt channel. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjt_MqEOcGM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjt_MqEOcGM
- skrowl 8y agoI'm pretty sure they don't mean "Playback of this pre-rendered MP4 was powered by a single GeForce RTX 2080 Ti!"
- 013a 8y agoYeah I could use some clarification on whether this is real-time or not. If its real-time, then its among the most impressive tech demos ever showcased. If its pre-rendered then how is it different from the films Pixar and Dreamworks put out every year? Its visually stunning but ultimately you can make computers do anything if you're willing to sit around for a 2 week render process.
- zaroth 8y agoSo much for uncanny valley, to me that just looked fabulous. I don’t quite comprehend the development process to build a short line this. Everything from the surroundings and environment, to the humanoid model and making natural movement, obviously the facial modeling and expressions, the water effects. The sound track is probably the only thing I feel like I have a decent mental model of how it comes together. I took one 3D graphics class in undergrad and it was all so absurdly low level basics, most just mathematics, it never remotely showed how something like this could actually be put together.
- VectorLock 8y agoBlog posts that dissect the rendering of things like GTA 5 really show how much goes into making scenes like this. http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/ http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic...
- ska 8y agoWouldn't part of the point of realtime raytracing would be to avoid a lot of this multipass trickery in the first place and just have a more sophisticated light transport model?
- foota 8y agoCould be wrong here, but I think most uses of raytracing like this limit it to shading and use traditional method for shadows. (Shading being the way that light "appears" on surfaces, shadows determining roughly how well illuminated a surface is. In theory you could use raytracing for both, but there may be limitations?)
- zamalek 8y agoI have no idea how RTX actually works, but based on the fact that exploits the existing rasterization architecture, I assume it adds at least one (very fast) pass.
- 8y ago
- shmerl 8y agoDXR and Nvidia sounds way too locked-in. There should be more collaborative effort to do that through Vulkan and on all GPUs.
- tntn 8y agoHow is DXR any more locked in than DX-anything else?
- shmerl 8y agoIt is pretty much same lock-in as DX anything, so same bad at the later.
- skrowl 8y agoDXR works with AMD cards as well - https://www.dsogaming.com/news/amd-states-that-all-of-its-dx12-gpus-support-real-time-ray-tracing-via-microsofts-dxr-fallback-layer/ https://www.dsogaming.com/news/amd-states-that-all-of-its-dx...
- aresant 8y agoDo they release these as executables ?
- mikepurvis 8y agoHistorically, similar demos have been released as downloads, so you can run them locally and compare your FPS with everyone else on your favourite overclocker forum: https://www.geforce.com/games-applications/pc-applications/a-new-dawn https://www.geforce.com/games-applications/pc-applications/a... I'd expect this one to be released eventually as well.
- yread 8y agoAnd does it fit in 64K?
- m0zg 8y agoSomehow the mouth of the model still looks "weird". Maybe because humans are hardwired to pay more attention to it?
- AWildC182 8y agoCan someone explain why the motion capture for this animation looked so much more realistic than it usually does? Character animation always looks over-smoothed or something to me but this is probably the first time I've seen where it doesn't have a stilted appearance.
- baddox 8y agoIt could just be that they spent an inordinate amount of time and money cleaning up the motion capture data for this demo. It's my understanding that the mo-cap in big-budget films is heavily modified by professional animators. Most hours-long video games probably don't have the budget for that.
- AWildC182 8y agoWhat about the source data makes it so difficult to clean up? It feels like nothing has progressed since the days of the first ping pong ball suit even though cameras and image processing have become infinitely more capable.
- baddox 8y agoI can only speculate. For faces, I'm sure there's tons of manual work to be done to reduce the uncanny valley, especially when it's being mapped onto a different facial geometry (like King Kong). For body movements, perhaps the collisions and interactions with the virtual world require a lot of manual tweaking to get them looking realistic.
- blihp 8y agoThe fact that there's so much of it and the sources are indirect and imprecise. All motion capture with actors is from the surface of their body and then you have to reverse-engineering all that data into skeletal and facial muscle positions.[1] The techniques are very cool but not perfect and there is error at every step of the process.[2] So then you still need tools and people go back through the data to clean it up / smooth it out... and even then, it's still not going to be perfect. [1] For some strange reason surgical procedures to implant hundreds of hyper-accurate mo-cap sensors in the actors or otherwise hack into their nervous system hasn't become a thing. ;-) [2] Camera lenses aren't perfect, dot placement (for marker based systems) isn't exact, tracking software slips since the markers aren't infinitely small and can move around a bit etc.
- jeswin 8y agoOne of the things I hate about modern games is that while the environment gets closer to realism, humans (face, skin) still look like corpses. I prefer cartoonish characters instead of being in uncanny valley. The woman in the demo looked somewhat real; if this is real time and reproducible in games then it's a huge step forward.
- worldsayshi 8y agoThis is real time. It's a bit annoying that the article doesn't lift that point since that is the most impressive point. Then again, I guess unless you don't include interactive aspects there's no telling what is actually real time and what is "baked".
- bcaulfield 8y agoYou're right, we've updated the post to reflect this.
- JohnBooty 8y agothere's no telling what is actually real time and what is "baked". Yea, that distinction is... fuzzy, and a little frustrating. Artistically, this demo is wonderful! Technically, it's somewhere between "yawn" and game-changing, depending on how much of the lighting and animation is pre-baked. Are the deformations of her skin, clothing, the water, etc. being calculated in real time, or was all the hard stuff precalculated and baked in? Reason why this matters is because the more dynamic this is, the closer we are to creating actual emergent/interactive experiences with this kind of technology, rather than just a way to render static cutscenes better.
- worldsayshi 8y agoWell put.
- dragontamer 8y ago> One of the things I hate about modern games is that while the environment gets closer to realism, humans (face, skin) still look like corpses. I prefer cartoonish characters instead of being in uncanny valley. Subsurface scattering is necessary for face / skin to work with light. You get good subsurface scattering in movies these days, but not really in video games yet. Its far too costly to make realistic skin renders. Skin is partially transparent: you can see the veins, blood, and even muscles through people's skin. Blushing is simply the act of blood rushing to the face, its immediately visible and instantly causes a reddish hue to due the skin's transparency. Simulating that outside of movie settings is going to take far more GPU power than what is available even in the next 5 years. We're still working on basic raytracing for video games, not even the advanced stuff yet. ------------ In effect, the "location" of where light is reflected on skin is "inside" the skin. Light penetrates into your skin and illuminates the stuff underneath. But traditional raytracing assumes that the reflection occurs on the "surface" of skin, resulting on a "waxy" look. The reflection is subtly in the wrong place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering Without subsurface scattering, you get the "barbie doll" look, even in raytracing. "Barbie Doll" works fine for cartoons, but its always a killer for me personally when I'm playing video games. EDIT: Example image with SSS (SubSurface Scattering): http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ahUMngIOPqU/T85dlEU9I7I/AAAAAAAAA5w/R6Wp2LqNDOM/s1600/SSS_caseStudy_02.jpg http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ahUMngIOPqU/T85dlEU9I7I/AAAAAAAAA5... ------------ Gems, Marble, etc. etc. are also partially translucent, and look awful in traditional video games. Subsurface Scattering makes these partially transparent rocks look more correct.
- sigi45 8y agoThe first time I read about rtx and raytracing I thought "holy shit so that's how it will happen and I will see it happening". The Transition started and now it's just a question of a little bit of time. Really looking forward to everything happening now on that level :).
- westoncb 8y agoI am actually underwhelmed by this demo... Not because it doesn't look great—it does—but because this is about par for the course for a next-gen GPU demo. They always look fantastic for definite reasons, not strictly hardware improvement. Remember nvidia's 'Dawn' demo from 2003? https://youtu.be/4D2meIv08rQ?t=48 https://youtu.be/4D2meIv08rQ?t=48 They put together super high quality demos like that for every new generation of card they released. The games that followed never looked quite as good since there are far more demands put on one's computational resources to generate a playable game world vs. a single scene that needs to look great. What would be potentially very interesting is to see the difference in work put into producing this with raytracing vs. traditional techniques. Being able to displace the unholy nightmare hodgepodge that comprises contemporary real-time rendering algorithms is the most exciting thing about raytracing. At least that's potentially the case; not clear to me how much improvement has been made possible by the RTX. EDIT: and, making me think this new one is part of a lineage of sorts, here's a later Dawn demo from 2012 (I think): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI1_quVr_3w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI1_quVr_3w EDIT2: rewatching, other aspects of this demo (i.e. not rendering specifically) are beyond 'par for the course', imo. But it's just generally higher production values, indicating more time/money/attention was put into producing the short itself, independent of the hardware backing it.
- _bxg1 8y agoThere's truth to this, although I find the demo easier to appreciate when I focus specifically on the things that benefit from RTX. That said... I think they could've picked a better scene to that end. The original stormtrooper one was great, but an outdoor scene (fewer surfaces reflecting indirect light) with a body of water (a flat reflection which can be easily achieved using non-RT techniques) doesn't really play to the technology's strengths. Side note: Geez, that linked video says so much about how much gaming culture has evolved in a decade and a half.
- kowdermeister 8y agoAnother awesome RTX demo from Crytech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nqhkDm2_Tw
- sorenjan 8y agoThat's rendered on an AMD Vega card, RTX is Nvidia's Raytracing tech. https://www.cryengine.com/news/crytek-releases-neon-noir-a-real-time-ray-tracing-demonstration-for-cryengine https://www.cryengine.com/news/crytek-releases-neon-noir-a-r...
- kraig 8y agoThis looks great. In a few short years I'll be able to get a VR headset and install a computer inside of one of these games so I can work remote from basically any virtual world. Then i'll only need to unplug and face reality to get the Postmates.
- JabavuAdams 8y agoAnd then we're going to use these awesome visuals to run around burning the forest, murdering the creatures, tea-bagging the photo-real corpses of our fallen foes, all while unable to have a good in-character conversation with an NPC, and being forced to listen to teenage voices hurling racial and sexist slurs. Plus ca change.
- ripsawridge 8y ago"Tell us how you really feel," asked no one, ever, but it's a free country so-- Yet another way to draw us away from actual connection with a painfully and joyously real world outside. Better to long to just once, enumerate and follow the subsurface scatter of light on the face of your beloved than to coo and preen over mere mechanism. A dying culture turns away from whats out there. Rolls over and wishes to slumber in dreams where everything is controlled and safe. Hence, the computer. I finally figured out what I hate about CGI the most: the animated figures convey no dismay at the weight of their bodies. It's how that dismay is coped with that injects grace into movement. The princess here looks nice enough until she moves. Then it becomes clear there is no soul within the frame that first suffers the pain of an ungainly body coping with gravity, then masters itself, and resolves to move as best it/she can anyway. That is beauty: the acceptance of limits. The carrying on despite them. You can see this in real people when they walk. Until the entire inner world is modeled, these constructions have less life that a good puppet. A puppet at least telegraphs the spark of life from the hand and soul that control it's strings. That spark is constant, microsecond communication and feedback. Stop trying to create simulacrums. Live the life you've been given. [Returns to computer job. Resolves nonetheless to walk under the moon tonight].
- craftyguy 8y agoHow is this article praising nvidia products on nvidia's website not spam?