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> frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired f

> frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play.

madeofpalk 2y ago
The same was true about 3D TVs. Also a gimmick.
- talldayo 2y ago
  3D TVs failed before they existed as a product category. You cannot encode enough information through stereoscopy to create a convincing or "realistic" 3D effect. The conditions for making it work have always been fickle and as 6DOF VR/AR is proving, it was never enough to be convincing anyways. Encoding two slightly different versions of a video and layering them on top of each other is a dirty hack. It is not a holistic solution to a problem they seriously intended to solve in the first place. It is a novelty designed from the bottom-up as a scarcely-usable toy. Ray tracing is, by comparison, the holy grail of all realtime lighting effects. Global illumination makes the current raster lighting techniques look primitive by comparison. It is not an exaggeration to say that realtime graphics research largely revolves around using hacks to imitate a fraction of ray tracing's power. They are piling on pipeline-after-pipeline for ambient occlusion, realtime reflections and shadowing, bloom and glare as well as god rays and screenspace/volumetric effects. These are all things you don't have to hack together when your scene is already path tracing the environment with the physical properties accounted for. Instead of stacking hacks, you have a coherent pipeline that can be denoised, antialiased, upscaled and post-processed in one pass. No shadowmaps, no baked lighting, all realtime. There is a reason why even Apple quit dragging their feet here - modern real-time graphics are the gimmick, ray tracing is the production-quality alternative.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Thank you. This guy gets it. Path tracing is the gold standard for computer graphics. It is a physically based rendering model that is based on how lighting actually works. There are degrees of path tracing of varying quality, but there is nothing else that is better from a visual quality and accuracy standpoint. Your modern AAA title does a massive amount of impressive hacks to get rasterization into the uncanny valley, as rasterization has nothing to do with how photons work. That can all be thrown out and replaced with “model photons interacting with the scene” if the path tracing hardware was powerful enough. It’d be simpler and perfectly accurate. The end result would not live in the uncanny valley, but would be indistinguishable from reality. Assuming the hardware was fast enough. But we’ll get there.
    - Nullabillity 2y ago
      This is all built on the, frankly, nonsensical assumption that photorealism is the, let alone a, primary goal.
      - adastra22 2y ago
        In most cases of high end / AAA game titles, it is. Not all, but certainly most.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - talldayo 2y ago
        Not really. Tiny Glade is a recent ray-traced title that has no goal of photorealism whatsoever, and it looks gorgeous with RT lighting and shadows: https://youtu.be/QAUSBxxgIbQ https://youtu.be/QAUSBxxgIbQ You can scale these same principles to even less photorealistic games like the Borderlands series or a Grand Theft Auto game. Ray tracing is less about photorealism (although it is a potent side effect) and more about creating dynamic lighting conditions for an interactive scene. By simulating the behavior of light, you get realistic lighting - photoreal or not a lot of games rely on SSR and shadowmaps that can be replaced with realtime RT.
MBCook 2y ago
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important, just that it’s the only thing they can think of to sell. Much like some AI stuff we’re seeing right now. Personally I think it’s useful for a few things, but it’s not the giant game changer I think they want you to think it is. Raytraced reflections are a very nice improvement. Using it for global illumination and shadows is also a very good improvement. But it’s not exactly what the move to multi texturing was, or the first GPUs. Or shaders.
nfriedly 2y ago
I don't know, Hardware Unboxed recently did a review of 30-some games comparing the visuals with and without ray tracing, and the conclusion for the majority of them was that it wasn't worth it. There were only maybe half a dozen games where the ray tracing was an unambiguous improvement. So I think calling it "a bit of a gimmick" is accurate for many of the games that shipped in, even if not all of them.
- wtallis 2y ago
  It's also a pretty large performance hit, even when the quality improvement is subtle. A major and unfortunate consequence is that it has driven even more games to rely on upscaling and heavy post-processing, all of which tend to blur the output image and introduce artifacts and add latency.
- jms55 2y ago
  You're looking at years of careful artist and engineer work to get something that looks almost as good as pathtraced visuals. The fact that it's so good without any raytracing is a credit to the developers. Replacing all that effort with raytracing and having one unified lighting system would be a _major_ time saver, and allows much more dynamic lighting than was previously possible. So yeah some current games don't look much better with RT, but the gameplay and art direction was designed without raytracing in mind in the first place, and had a _lot_ of work put into it to get those results. Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is amazing! And with another 3-5 years of algorithm development and hardware speedups, and developers and artists getting familiar with raytracing, we might start seeing games require raytracing. Games typically take 4+ years to develop, so anything you're seeing coming out now was probably started when the best GPU you could buy for raytracing was an RTX 2080 TI.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    > Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is amazing! Aside from Cyberpunk 2077 and a handful of ancient games with NVIDIA-sponsored remakes, what even offers fully path traced lighting as an option? The way it went for CP2077 makes your "70% usable" claim seem like quite an exaggeration: performance is only good if you have a current-generation GPU that cost at least $1k, the path tracing option didn't get added until years after the game originally shipped, and they had to fix a bunch of glitches resulting from the game world being built without path tracing in mind. We're clearly still years away from path tracing being broadly available among AAA games, let alone playable on any large portion of gaming PCs. For the foreseeable future, games will still need to look good without fully path traced lighting.
kllrnohj 2y ago
The M1-M4 GPUs are also nowhere close to fast enough for it to be useful. Just like Snapdragon having ray tracing support is ridiculous.
musictubes 2y ago
Can the hardware for ray tracing be used for anything else? Ray tracing is just math, is that math applicable for any non graphics use?
- boulos 2y ago
  You'll have to see what the instruction set / features are capable of, but most likely the "hardware ray tracing" support means it can do ray-BVH and ray-triangle intersection in hardware. You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection. The other parts of ray tracing like shading and so on, are usually just done on the general compute.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    > You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection. The problem with doing so, though, and with GPU physics in general is that it's too high latency to incorporate effectively into a typical game loop. It'll work fine for things that don't impact the world, like particle simulations or hair/cloth physics, but for anything interactive the latency cost tends to kill it. That and also the GPU is usually the visual bottleneck anyway so having it spend power on stuff the half-idle CPU could do adequately isn't a good use of resources.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      I don't follow. You would do intersection tests every frame, right? Run the intersection tests, feed the results into the next frame calculation. Results may be delayed 1 frame, but at 60Hz or 120Hz that isn't really a problem.
      - kllrnohj 2y ago
        It is a problem. You've generated an entire impossible world state and shown it to the user before discovering it's bad and needing to rewind it. The faster your fps, the more flickery this ends up looking as you're constantly pulling back the camera or player or whatever a frame after it collided. The lower the fps, the more sluggish and unresponsive it feels. Alternatively you need to pipeline your entire world state and now you've got some pretty bad input latency
zamadatix 2y ago
While it may eventually be a non-gimmick in the industry as the compute needed for it advances more it's always going to be quite the gimmick in terms of what the M1/M2 GPU can do with it.
rowanG077 2y ago
Wow! if the industry is pushing it must be good right? Just like the megapixels wars for cameras.
flohofwoe 2y ago
...and yet the most popular use case for raytracing seems to be more correct reflections in puddles ;)
ZiiS 2y ago
Not sure if I can process "incredibly arrogant" in relation to the Herculean work and insight demonstrated. However, it is important to put things in context. Something can be a 'Gimmick' on several year old integrated mobile hardware that can't run most games at a reasonable FPS without it; and not a 'Gimmick' on cutting edge space heaters.
pxc 2y ago
> it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play. Ray tracing is also extremely heavily marketed, and at a time when GPU upgrades have become infrequent for most people due to extremely high prices and relatively weak overall performance gains year over year. The industry is adopting ray tracing because they need to be able to offer something new when the overall performance gains generation over generation have been slowing for years. They've been leveraging marketing hard to try to generate demand for upgrades among gamers, knowing cryptocurrency won't buoy them forever. That ray tracing is cited as a reason among gamers who do upgrade their GPUs is unsurprising and not really a strong indicator that ray tracing is a great feature. At any rate, both the gaming industry and the wider tech industry are known to be extremely faddish at times. So is consumer behavior. Things 'the whole industry is doing' has always been a category that includes many gimmicks.
ozgrakkurt 2y ago
It is marketing bs, it was not needed and is not needed imo, and many other people’s opinions. Expressing opinion can’t be arrogant imho

madeofpalk 2y ago

The same was true about 3D TVs. Also a gimmick.

talldayo 2y ago
3D TVs failed before they existed as a product category. You cannot encode enough information through stereoscopy to create a convincing or "realistic" 3D effect. The conditions for making it work have always been fickle and as 6DOF VR/AR is proving, it was never enough to be convincing anyways. Encoding two slightly different versions of a video and layering them on top of each other is a dirty hack. It is not a holistic solution to a problem they seriously intended to solve in the first place. It is a novelty designed from the bottom-up as a scarcely-usable toy. Ray tracing is, by comparison, the holy grail of all realtime lighting effects. Global illumination makes the current raster lighting techniques look primitive by comparison. It is not an exaggeration to say that realtime graphics research largely revolves around using hacks to imitate a fraction of ray tracing's power. They are piling on pipeline-after-pipeline for ambient occlusion, realtime reflections and shadowing, bloom and glare as well as god rays and screenspace/volumetric effects. These are all things you don't have to hack together when your scene is already path tracing the environment with the physical properties accounted for. Instead of stacking hacks, you have a coherent pipeline that can be denoised, antialiased, upscaled and post-processed in one pass. No shadowmaps, no baked lighting, all realtime. There is a reason why even Apple quit dragging their feet here - modern real-time graphics are the gimmick, ray tracing is the production-quality alternative.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Thank you. This guy gets it. Path tracing is the gold standard for computer graphics. It is a physically based rendering model that is based on how lighting actually works. There are degrees of path tracing of varying quality, but there is nothing else that is better from a visual quality and accuracy standpoint. Your modern AAA title does a massive amount of impressive hacks to get rasterization into the uncanny valley, as rasterization has nothing to do with how photons work. That can all be thrown out and replaced with “model photons interacting with the scene” if the path tracing hardware was powerful enough. It’d be simpler and perfectly accurate. The end result would not live in the uncanny valley, but would be indistinguishable from reality. Assuming the hardware was fast enough. But we’ll get there.
  - Nullabillity 2y ago
    This is all built on the, frankly, nonsensical assumption that photorealism is the, let alone a, primary goal.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      In most cases of high end / AAA game titles, it is. Not all, but certainly most.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - talldayo 2y ago
      Not really. Tiny Glade is a recent ray-traced title that has no goal of photorealism whatsoever, and it looks gorgeous with RT lighting and shadows: https://youtu.be/QAUSBxxgIbQ https://youtu.be/QAUSBxxgIbQ You can scale these same principles to even less photorealistic games like the Borderlands series or a Grand Theft Auto game. Ray tracing is less about photorealism (although it is a potent side effect) and more about creating dynamic lighting conditions for an interactive scene. By simulating the behavior of light, you get realistic lighting - photoreal or not a lot of games rely on SSR and shadowmaps that can be replaced with realtime RT.

MBCook 2y ago

That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important, just that it’s the only thing they can think of to sell. Much like some AI stuff we’re seeing right now. Personally I think it’s useful for a few things, but it’s not the giant game changer I think they want you to think it is. Raytraced reflections are a very nice improvement. Using it for global illumination and shadows is also a very good improvement. But it’s not exactly what the move to multi texturing was, or the first GPUs. Or shaders.

nfriedly 2y ago

I don't know, Hardware Unboxed recently did a review of 30-some games comparing the visuals with and without ray tracing, and the conclusion for the majority of them was that it wasn't worth it. There were only maybe half a dozen games where the ray tracing was an unambiguous improvement. So I think calling it "a bit of a gimmick" is accurate for many of the games that shipped in, even if not all of them.

wtallis 2y ago
It's also a pretty large performance hit, even when the quality improvement is subtle. A major and unfortunate consequence is that it has driven even more games to rely on upscaling and heavy post-processing, all of which tend to blur the output image and introduce artifacts and add latency.
jms55 2y ago
You're looking at years of careful artist and engineer work to get something that looks almost as good as pathtraced visuals. The fact that it's so good without any raytracing is a credit to the developers. Replacing all that effort with raytracing and having one unified lighting system would be a _major_ time saver, and allows much more dynamic lighting than was previously possible. So yeah some current games don't look much better with RT, but the gameplay and art direction was designed without raytracing in mind in the first place, and had a _lot_ of work put into it to get those results. Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is amazing! And with another 3-5 years of algorithm development and hardware speedups, and developers and artists getting familiar with raytracing, we might start seeing games require raytracing. Games typically take 4+ years to develop, so anything you're seeing coming out now was probably started when the best GPU you could buy for raytracing was an RTX 2080 TI.
- wtallis 2y ago
  > Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is amazing! Aside from Cyberpunk 2077 and a handful of ancient games with NVIDIA-sponsored remakes, what even offers fully path traced lighting as an option? The way it went for CP2077 makes your "70% usable" claim seem like quite an exaggeration: performance is only good if you have a current-generation GPU that cost at least $1k, the path tracing option didn't get added until years after the game originally shipped, and they had to fix a bunch of glitches resulting from the game world being built without path tracing in mind. We're clearly still years away from path tracing being broadly available among AAA games, let alone playable on any large portion of gaming PCs. For the foreseeable future, games will still need to look good without fully path traced lighting.

kllrnohj 2y ago

The M1-M4 GPUs are also nowhere close to fast enough for it to be useful. Just like Snapdragon having ray tracing support is ridiculous.

musictubes 2y ago

Can the hardware for ray tracing be used for anything else? Ray tracing is just math, is that math applicable for any non graphics use?

boulos 2y ago
You'll have to see what the instruction set / features are capable of, but most likely the "hardware ray tracing" support means it can do ray-BVH and ray-triangle intersection in hardware. You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection. The other parts of ray tracing like shading and so on, are usually just done on the general compute.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  > You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection. The problem with doing so, though, and with GPU physics in general is that it's too high latency to incorporate effectively into a typical game loop. It'll work fine for things that don't impact the world, like particle simulations or hair/cloth physics, but for anything interactive the latency cost tends to kill it. That and also the GPU is usually the visual bottleneck anyway so having it spend power on stuff the half-idle CPU could do adequately isn't a good use of resources.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    I don't follow. You would do intersection tests every frame, right? Run the intersection tests, feed the results into the next frame calculation. Results may be delayed 1 frame, but at 60Hz or 120Hz that isn't really a problem.
    - kllrnohj 2y ago
      It is a problem. You've generated an entire impossible world state and shown it to the user before discovering it's bad and needing to rewind it. The faster your fps, the more flickery this ends up looking as you're constantly pulling back the camera or player or whatever a frame after it collided. The lower the fps, the more sluggish and unresponsive it feels. Alternatively you need to pipeline your entire world state and now you've got some pretty bad input latency

zamadatix 2y ago

While it may eventually be a non-gimmick in the industry as the compute needed for it advances more it's always going to be quite the gimmick in terms of what the M1/M2 GPU can do with it.

rowanG077 2y ago

Wow! if the industry is pushing it must be good right? Just like the megapixels wars for cameras.

flohofwoe 2y ago

...and yet the most popular use case for raytracing seems to be more correct reflections in puddles ;)

ZiiS 2y ago

Not sure if I can process "incredibly arrogant" in relation to the Herculean work and insight demonstrated. However, it is important to put things in context. Something can be a 'Gimmick' on several year old integrated mobile hardware that can't run most games at a reasonable FPS without it; and not a 'Gimmick' on cutting edge space heaters.

pxc 2y ago

> it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play. Ray tracing is also extremely heavily marketed, and at a time when GPU upgrades have become infrequent for most people due to extremely high prices and relatively weak overall performance gains year over year. The industry is adopting ray tracing because they need to be able to offer something new when the overall performance gains generation over generation have been slowing for years. They've been leveraging marketing hard to try to generate demand for upgrades among gamers, knowing cryptocurrency won't buoy them forever. That ray tracing is cited as a reason among gamers who do upgrade their GPUs is unsurprising and not really a strong indicator that ray tracing is a great feature. At any rate, both the gaming industry and the wider tech industry are known to be extremely faddish at times. So is consumer behavior. Things 'the whole industry is doing' has always been a category that includes many gimmicks.

ozgrakkurt 2y ago

It is marketing bs, it was not needed and is not needed imo, and many other people’s opinions. Expressing opinion can’t be arrogant imho