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Games don't do full raytracing like blender or maya. Their raytracing works hand to hand with rasterization.

NL807 3y ago
Indeed it does. Most of the ray/path tracing happens in screen space.
throwaway17_17 3y ago
While I was tempted to make the same statement/assumption, the breakdown in the article/tech-tear-down seems to show a near-completely ray traced frame with only a very, very small portion of rasterization usage. If this update is indicative of the AAA spaces rendering proclivities I would say your statement just isn’t true any longer. I think one of the strong suits of game graphics is the results at any cost model of rendering tech, where the focus is on using whatever methods get the best results the fastest (and hopefully within frame budgets) wins out. Since the advent of polygon rendering rasterization has been the best solution for attempts at realism (be that hyper- or photo- realism). However, rasterization and the rendering ‘shortcuts’ used to achieve certain effects were also useful for other styles of rendering. However, if every bit of graphics silicon is going to be designed and optimized for a physically based, photorealistic rendering result it may be difficult to bend that functionality toward some non-photorealistic usage. I worry everything is going to end up having the same stamped out photorealistic appearance, in a similar way to the comments I’ve seen about the emerging Unreal 5 ‘look’. And that to get away from that look will require giving up a large chunk of GPU rendering horse power.
- cma 3y ago
  Animated movies use pathtracing and don't have that problem. You can get a lot of looks out of it, and do things like tune the color saturation of bounces.
redox99 3y ago
Most games (including Cyberpunk without the path tracing mode) do use hybrid renderers indeed (so it's sprinkling ray tracing to specific parts of the traditional pipeline). The path tracing mode mentioned here however, does "full raytracing" like blender does (outside of a few exceptions such as particles). Same with Portal RTX, Quake RTX and a few others.
- Cloudef 3y ago
  It seems transparent geometry isn't being path traced (or if they are, they immediately terminate the ray on hit and applying the same trick as in their rasterizer)
- MindSpunk 3y ago
  No, it doesn't. Not entirely anyway. All the light transport is calculated using path tracing but primary visibility is still using the rasterizer. https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray-tracing-overdrive-update-launches-april-11/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray... Nvidia's own announcement shows the path tracing overdrive mode is still tracing rays from a G-buffer, which would've been generated with the rasterizer.
  - Vecr 3y ago
    I actually don't think Blender does "full ray tracing" exactly either, or at least at some point it didn't. At least to the point where you do get some rasterization artifacts, like being able to see the polygons on the edge of objects. That's probably about as good as you can get. Combined with a "nanite" like technology, it's probably not much of a problem.
girvo 3y ago
As others have explained: that is becoming less and less true as time and tech marches on. For now, we'll always have both, as too many cards/consoles can't path trace at a good enough rate. But the artist pipeline wins that come from fully path tracing lights are too good to pass up, so it's coming. This article alone shows that basically all of the frame is path traced rather than raster. It's coming, and faster you might think.

Indeed it does. Most of the ray/path tracing happens in screen space.

While I was tempted to make the same statement/assumption, the breakdown in the article/tech-tear-down seems to show a near-completely ray traced frame with only a very, very small portion of rasterization usage. If this update is indicative of the AAA spaces rendering proclivities I would say your statement just isn’t true any longer. I think one of the strong suits of game graphics is the results at any cost model of rendering tech, where the focus is on using whatever methods get the best results the fastest (and hopefully within frame budgets) wins out. Since the advent of polygon rendering rasterization has been the best solution for attempts at realism (be that hyper- or photo- realism). However, rasterization and the rendering ‘shortcuts’ used to achieve certain effects were also useful for other styles of rendering. However, if every bit of graphics silicon is going to be designed and optimized for a physically based, photorealistic rendering result it may be difficult to bend that functionality toward some non-photorealistic usage. I worry everything is going to end up having the same stamped out photorealistic appearance, in a similar way to the comments I’ve seen about the emerging Unreal 5 ‘look’. And that to get away from that look will require giving up a large chunk of GPU rendering horse power.

cma 3y ago
Animated movies use pathtracing and don't have that problem. You can get a lot of looks out of it, and do things like tune the color saturation of bounces.

redox99 3y ago

Most games (including Cyberpunk without the path tracing mode) do use hybrid renderers indeed (so it's sprinkling ray tracing to specific parts of the traditional pipeline). The path tracing mode mentioned here however, does "full raytracing" like blender does (outside of a few exceptions such as particles). Same with Portal RTX, Quake RTX and a few others.

Cloudef 3y ago
It seems transparent geometry isn't being path traced (or if they are, they immediately terminate the ray on hit and applying the same trick as in their rasterizer)
MindSpunk 3y ago
No, it doesn't. Not entirely anyway. All the light transport is calculated using path tracing but primary visibility is still using the rasterizer. https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray-tracing-overdrive-update-launches-april-11/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/cyberpunk-2077-ray... Nvidia's own announcement shows the path tracing overdrive mode is still tracing rays from a G-buffer, which would've been generated with the rasterizer.
- Vecr 3y ago
  I actually don't think Blender does "full ray tracing" exactly either, or at least at some point it didn't. At least to the point where you do get some rasterization artifacts, like being able to see the polygons on the edge of objects. That's probably about as good as you can get. Combined with a "nanite" like technology, it's probably not much of a problem.

girvo 3y ago

As others have explained: that is becoming less and less true as time and tech marches on. For now, we'll always have both, as too many cards/consoles can't path trace at a good enough rate. But the artist pipeline wins that come from fully path tracing lights are too good to pass up, so it's coming. This article alone shows that basically all of the frame is path traced rather than raster. It's coming, and faster you might think.