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The authors' argument fundamentally boils down to 'people want cutting-edge graphics and that always involves squeezing the last bit of performance from hardwar
by nightcracker 6y ago
The authors' argument fundamentally boils down to 'people want cutting-edge graphics and that always involves squeezing the last bit of performance from hardware with complex tricks'.
And while true for now, I think the title is plain wrong in the longer term. There will come a time in which hardware is sufficiently powerful that one no longer needs these tricks to create top graphics. And physically based raytracing absolutely will simplify all of rendering to a couple core components when that time comes.
- Koiwai 6y agoSounds like communism to me.
- TwoBit 6y agoMonitor resolution and frame rate inflation seem to have endpoints at 4K or 8K and 144Hz. Scene detail still has some way to go before diminishing returns and so that will consume years of hardware evolution. I agree with you in principle but I don't think we're within a decade of that yet.
- modeless 6y agoVR/AR will continue past 8K to 16K and beyond. 240+ Hz will be desirable there too. We're going to need to keep squeezing the hardware for all it's worth for the foreseeable future. I doubt there will be "sufficiently powerful" hardware to drive that kind of workload without heroic optimization work within my lifetime.
- extropy 6y agoNah, the human eye has only ~5 MPix worth of sensors, most of them grayscale at that. We just need inexpensive eye tracking and foveated rendering. https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/cameras-vs-human-eye.htm https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/cameras-vs-human...
- carlhjerpe 6y agoBut our eyes can move, so while we might not need to render and update XXk@xxxHz we still need the display to have that resolution wherever we look right?
- joefourier 6y agoNo, because you don’t need to render at full resolution where you’re not looking. That’s the appeal of foveated rendering, you just render say, a tiny 1080p region where you’re currently looking, and render the rest also at 1080p but stretched out over your entire FOV, and with fast enough frame rate and eye tracking, plus a decent blending algorithm, it will be unnoticeable.
- carlhjerpe 6y agoI'm sorry if I wasn't explicit enough. What i meant is that we still need the display to have "the 16k" amount of pixels so that we can have the superhigh ppi wherever we choose to look. We indeed would only need to render high quality in a small percentage around where the eye is looking.
- joefourier 6y agoMy bad, I see what you mean. You're quite right, although there is some research in using MEMS to move the projected foveated region physically, which would remove the need for ultra-high density displays.
- leetrout 6y ago
- Ygg2 6y agoI think after 144Hz, you hit a point of really diminishing returns. Like is it possible in blind test to feel 240Hz vs 144Hz? It might give you in game like 1% advantage for +100% the costs.
- dmytroi 6y agoFWIW tried testufo [0] with Samsung G7, 240Hz vs 144Hz was very noticeable on image and text scrolling tests. I guess for a person who never seen 240Hz it would be hard to identify it in a blind test, but after you've seen how the images/text looks like in scrolling, it's trivially identifiable. - [0] testufo.com
- codetrotter 6y ago240 is not evenly divisible by 144. Curious to know if 240 vs 120 Hz is more or less noticeable on a 240 Hz monitor than 240 vs 144 Hz on a 240 Hz monitor.
- doikor 6y agoWith games as long as you have good enough hardware to run the game at a steady frame rate you want it being divisible by some magic number does not matter. Also the old "standard" Hz for games is 60hz so going to 120 and then to 240 is the "natural" steps. The old 144hz goal was/is nice if you want to display 24fps (movies) content but games don't work like that. They display correctly without any judder/pulldown at whatever frame rate you want (as long as you have the hardware to run it at that rate)
- q-big 6y ago> 240 is not evenly divisible by 144. Sounds like the beginning of a sales pitch for a 720 Hz display. :-)
- Ygg2 6y agoBut that's the point. If in a blind test you can't tell the difference, then there is very little to no perceptible difference. If testufo was randomized with multiple repeating patterns and random offsets, it could be a much better test. Here you can accidentally bias yourself.
- the8472 6y ago> Monitor resolution and frame rate inflation seem to have endpoints at 4K or 8K and 144Hz. laughs in light fields
- rebuilder 6y agoComing from the VFX field, I think that point is pretty far off still. Even with current gen offline renderers running on renderfarms, we're left doing cost-benefit analysis on rendertime vs. quality issues. (Noise being the big one). Real-time, fully generic, photorealistic rendering is decidedly not here yet, and I seriously doubt it's around the corner, either.
- simion314 6y agoI seen many indie games made with Unreal Engine or Unity that have terrible performance in rendering a simple level where a AAA game like Tomb Raider will use less resources and have 10x more details. So when the hardware gets so popular that indie developers can deliver similar graphics as AAA games today the AAA games will still do it 10x better by having engineers optimizing things.
- ChiefOBrien 6y agoIt's not the engine's fault for having terrible performance on simple levels. Most indie devs don't bother with LODs, occlusion culling, and turning off unused features. Decades old tricks like turning off unseen/far away actors, merging mesh and material to bring down drawcalls is also alien in the minds of asset flicks. Both engine provides many monitoring tools and utilities to fine-tune performance and settings on each quality level...
- simion314 6y agoCorrect, sorry I was not clear and it appeared I blame the engine , the indie devs are also not to be shamed because they did not done the optimizations, they most of the time focus on the content. My point was that even if hardware gets 100x better we still have a difference between a AAA game that can render a giant open world and a AA game that will use smaller worlds like a space ships with loading screens for each room.
- kyriakos 6y agoOne game that was recently released has shown that most games are simply unoptimized and that is Doom Eternal. It performs substantially better compared to any other game that was released in 2020 at the same resolutions even on old GPUs.
- forrestthewoods 6y ago> There will come a time in which hardware is sufficiently powerful that one no longer needs these tricks to create top graphics. I deeply wish this were true. But it doesn't seem likely to me. Games are real-time. And frame rate expectations are getting higher (60, 90, and even 120Hz) which means frame times are getting shorter (16ms, 11ms, 8ms). Rasterization is likely to always be faster than raytracing so the tradeoff will always be there. Pixar movies look better and better ever year. The more compute they can throw at the problem the better pixels they can render. Their offline rendering only gets more complex and higher quality every year. It's so complex and expensive I'm genuinely afraid that small animation studios simply won't be able to compete soon. Maybe raytracing will be "fast enough" that most gamedevs can use the default Unity/Unreal raytracer and call it a day. But imho the author is spot on that AAA will continue to deeply invest in highly complex, bespoke solutions to squeeze every last drop and provide competitive advantage.
- irjustin 6y agoFWIW i think it's possible. The question is whether it's within our lifetime. There's an upper limit to what's useful - the real world. If our minds can't comprehend it, you've hit the upper limit of practical use. Once in game graphics become literally indistinguishable from real life then we'll start to plateau in terms of complexity of "tricks" and raw computing power will be able to catch up.
- lrem 6y agoI'm afraid we won't see this limit getting hit in our lifetimes though. The gap is way too many orders of magnitude.
- forrestthewoods 6y ago> Once in game graphics become literally indistinguishable from real life then we'll start to plateau in terms of complexity of "tricks" and raw computing power will be able to catch up. Maybe. Alternatively games won't actually want to render photorealistic and will want to render with varying types of stylized graphics. Is that easier or harder? Probably a little bit of both. We actually are at a point where we can real-time render photorealistic scenes... for certain types of objects. Primarily static environments. Photogrammetry is basically cheating, but it is highly effective! Mandalorian is famously filmed on a virtual set and it's cool as fuck. Graphics is moving rapidly into physics. We might be soon be able to render photorealistic scene descriptions. However simulating the virtual world we still have a long, long ways to go. By simulation I mean everything from the environment (ocean, snow, etc) to characters. We most definitely can not synthesize arbitrary virtual humans. Will we someday see a movie that _looks_ like a live action movie but is completely virtual? Oof. Maybe? But even if we could, would we want to? I'm not sure.
- killtimeatwork 6y agoHow long does it take to render a frame from a Disney's newest CGI movie release? 12 hours? So yeah, once the hardware improvements bring down that 12 hours to 16 milliseconds, then we won't need the hacks...
- xiphias2 6y agoActually people don’t expect realistic simularion. They expect better. I love the original Lion King, but the movie was just plain boring with its realistic graphics.
- manquer 6y agoMaking good entertainment has nothing to do with limitations of the medium. It has do with creativity and talent. The original lion King worked because it was hand drawn graphics, the story , the dance and expressions on cat faces worked because graphics was limited. The new one was a dull imitation with no understanding of what made it successful. you should checkout the screen rant video on this https://youtu.be/sbx97kKHUHw https://youtu.be/sbx97kKHUHw Art and games have been successful even if medium is limiting,ppl still read books watch plays and enjoy playing games like FNAF even if far superior tech is available.
- xiphias2 6y agoSure, you are right about all of this, I just was explaining that even when we have perfect simulations, people want more. If the limitations of medium wouldn’t matter, people and studios wouldn’t pay billions of dollars for VFX.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoI though Lion King was ok. The new Beauty and Beast movie however was a whole lot worse than the cartoon. Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs Potts, etc all felt a lot more human and emotional in the cartoon than with the “realistic” CGI. They actually looked creepy in the new movie.
- Andrex 6y ago
- makapuf 6y agoIn a different context, look at text rendering. It should be the opposite of the spectrum and stabilized for a long time, except we keep adding better rendering tricks and simplifications (not at the scale of 3d rendering but keep in mind how simple the problem looks compared to it)
- crazygringo 6y agoI think it's the opposite. Text rendering used to involve complicated hinting and then subpixel rendering. These days on Retina screens you don't need hinting or subpixel rendering. You just render it like any set of curves, no longer any tricks about it being a font, because it's hi-res enough. What rendering tricks are you suggesting are being added rather than being taken away, for fonts?
- 0-_-0 6y agoI don't think so, more rays will equal better graphics for a veeery long time. The Rendering Equation [0] is basically an infinite dimensional recursive integral, so computing it will be expensive. Today's Nvidia RTX hardware doesn't even come close to computing it properly, it can still only do bad approximations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendering_equation
- reitzensteinm 6y agoI honestly wouldn't be surprised if Moore's Law dies off before we get to a point where a heavily optimized graphics pipeline isn't worth it. I think the author makes a good point at the high end, but Raytracing is going to simplify the crap out of whatever we have that's like Unity in a decade or two (hopefully not Unity). So many issues like transparency sorting, AO & GI, depth of field, baked and real time shadows and reflections you basically don't have to deal with the complexities of as an end user. But you'll be leaving a lot of performance on the table with a one size fits all solution.
- kaba0 6y agoMoore’s law has ended quite a few years ago - or do you mean it regarding GPUs because I don’t know about that. But even though parallelism can be increased, the gains from them are limited as per Amdahl.
- reitzensteinm 6y agoMoore's law is about transistor density and has not ended. See the performance ramp of recent model GPUs. Amdahl basically does not apply to graphics tasks which are embarrassingly parallel. Raytracing will be no different. And in fact you're getting rid of many preparation steps pre render that may be tricky to parallelize well, and replacing it with brute force.
- Const-me 6y agoOptic is incredibly complicated, because matter is incredibly complicated. Ray tracing is good for rendering surfaces, reflection and refraction, but what we see is not limited to these things. Volumetric stuff is all over the place: fire and other plasma, smoke and other aerosols, other forms of mixed-state matter. Also we have lots of liquid water on our planet, when it interacts with solids things and/or air, the visual complexity of the scene simply explodes. Look at boiling water, or streams of water, or shoreline. And to complicate things even more, some visuals depend on wave nature of the light: soap bubble, rainbow, or DVD disk. Here’s some 15 years old tech.demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsWh66MvqBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsWh66MvqBg Stuff like the brick wall with these shadows and reflections is awesome fit for RT. The final scene also good. However, close up scenes of the ground with water pouring all over the stuff, or that glass window with drippling water at 1:30-1:45 — RT won’t help a bit. And the rain / water / wet surfaces is about half of their shaders: https://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/ToyShop-Eurographics_AnimationFestival.pdf https://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/ToyShop-Eu...
- Rapzid 6y agoI don't believe that's going to happen in the foreseeable future. Just like in film CGI the hardware is always going to continue to chase the best images content creators would like to create. Hybrid render pipelines and AI enhanced RT passes is the future.