4 ms·

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.
      - Nullabillity 2y ago
        The question isn't "can you achieve your look with RT?" but "do you need RT to achieve your look?". As long as traditional lighting is enough (and given that it has for the last 2 decades or so), RT remains a gimmick.
        Mawr 2y ago
        Let me get this 100% straight, rendering light the exact same way reality itself does it is a gimmick? In any case, RT isn't just about getting pretty graphics. It massively lowers the artists' workload since there's no need to painstakingly go through each in-game area and add fake lights to make everything look good. No gaming studio will pass up on the opportunity to get better graphics and better productivity. It really is just a matter of waiting a few years for the hardware to get good enough.

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.
    - Nullabillity 2y ago
      The question isn't "can you achieve your look with RT?" but "do you need RT to achieve your look?". As long as traditional lighting is enough (and given that it has for the last 2 decades or so), RT remains a gimmick.
      - Mawr 2y ago
        Let me get this 100% straight, rendering light the exact same way reality itself does it is a gimmick? In any case, RT isn't just about getting pretty graphics. It massively lowers the artists' workload since there's no need to painstakingly go through each in-game area and add fake lights to make everything look good. No gaming studio will pass up on the opportunity to get better graphics and better productivity. It really is just a matter of waiting a few years for the hardware to get good enough.