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While this works OK-ish for static images, it is almost unusable for animations. But for static images, blur+sharpen in Photoshop has worked OK-ish, too, for ma
by fxtentacle 7y ago
While this works OK-ish for static images, it is almost unusable for animations. But for static images, blur+sharpen in Photoshop has worked OK-ish, too, for many years.
So the practical benefit of this is negligible.
What we need is a denoising technique where the denoising artifacts move convincingly with the features of the scene, so that you can use it for movies and games.
Oh and for games, as long as this is NVIDIA-exclusive, developers have to treat it as an optional add-on. For multiplayer games, that implies that Ray Tracing may never show details (such as a reflection of an enemy) that would give a strategical advantage.
Plus the real issue with contemporary game development is that consoles make a majority of the revenue (due to less piracy) but they choke when you have 50k+ polygons on an animated character. And you'll be limited to 2 GB GPU RAM on 30% of your PC player base, because they use laptop GPUs.
In the end, then, you usually don't have enough detail to make ray-tracing look good. It looks amazing for high-poly curved surfaces, such as those used for offline-rendered cinema movies. But on a blocky realtime game model, ray-tracing may also highlight artifacts.
Here's a ray-traced low poly bunny:
https://i.imgur.com/MGotRC7.png https://i.imgur.com/MGotRC7.png
Notice how clearly you can see that it is low poly. In a rasterization engine, one would "fix" this by blurring the edges with shaders and bending the corners with normal maps.
So in a sense, ray-tracing is too honest to work well with current video game models.
- FreeFull 7y agoThere's no reason why ray-tracing can't work with bent normals. That's how Blender's "smooth shading" works, and Blender uses raytracing for rendering.
- fxtentacle 7y agoThat is correct for Cycles, but the kind of raytracing that is possible with hardware-acceleration inside a GPU is severely restricted in comparison to a general-purpose CPU raytracer like Blender's Cycles. I believe Eevee, the Blender GPU ray-tracer, does also currently not support having reflection rays collide with surface generated by normal/displacement operations, but instead they will approximate flight path by using the unmodified geometry.
- dTal 7y agoCycles also runs on GPUs.
- fxtentacle 7y agoBut without using the ray-tracing hardware advertised in the article.
- dTal 7y agoYou said, "the kind of raytracing that is possible with hardware-acceleration inside a GPU is severely restricted in comparison to a general-purpose CPU raytracer like Blender's Cycles." This is manifestly incorrect.
- hgoel 7y agoYou're a decade behind on consoles, 50k animated triangles haven't been an issue for years. Even early PS4 games had more triangles per character, in some cases more triangles simply for hair, let alone the rest of a character.
- fxtentacle 7y ago"Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege" 40,000 Triangles + 3 2048 x 2048 Texture Maps https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0eKg8 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0eKg8 "Fortnite" LOD 0: 23,041 Triangles https://i.imgur.com/y8fOip0.png https://i.imgur.com/y8fOip0.png I'll give you that purely GPU-skinned on PS4 can go up to 700k for the entire scene, but that means 14 or less people visible at a 50k budget. So for a game like Assassin's Creed, the per-character and per-item poly counts need to be significantly lower, to make sure the combined sum of the scene is still manageable.
- willis936 7y ago>Oh and for games, as long as this is NVIDIA-exclusive It isn't. [0][1] The APIs are intelligently laid out such that hardware accelerated raytracing can be used on popular APIs regardless of GPU vendor, if the vendor has made their drivers correctly. 0. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/announcing-microsoft-directx-raytracing/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/announcing-microsoft-... 1. https://www.khronos.org/blog/ray-tracing-in-vulkan https://www.khronos.org/blog/ray-tracing-in-vulkan
- fxtentacle 7y agoAt the moment, there is no AMD GPU which supports the full ray-tracing spec. So effectively, it is NVIDIA-only.
- fxtentacle 7y agoJust as an explanation, I was referring to "Denoising for Ray Tracing", because that's what the link points to. I do not oppose ray-tracing in general, but merely the over-hyped denoiser.