5 ms·

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 o

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.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > For the foreseeable future, games will still need to look good without fully path traced lighting. And in 7-10 years when the software stack is matured, we'll be thanking ourselves for doing this in hardware the right way. I don't understand why planning for the future is considered so wasteful - this is an architecture Apple can re-use for future hardware and scale to larger GPUs. Maybe it doesn't make sense for Macs today, but in 5 years that may no longer be the case. Now people don't have to throw away a perfectly good computer made in these twilight years of Moore's law. For non-games applications like Blender or Cinema4D, having hardware-accelerated ray tracing and denoising is already a game-changer. Instead of switching between preview and render layers, you can interact with a production-quality render in real time. Materials are properly emissive and transmissive, PBR and normal maps composite naturally instead of needing different settings, and you can count the time it takes before getting an acceptable frame in milliseconds, not minutes. I don't often give Apple the benefit of the doubt, but hardware-accelerated ray tracing is a no-brainer here. If they aren't going to abandon Metal, and they intend to maintain their minuscule foothold in PC gaming, they have to lay the groundwork for future titles to get developed on. They have the hardware investment, they have the capital to invest in their software, and their competitors like Khronos (apparently) and Microsoft both had ray tracing APIs for years when Apple finally released theirs.
    - rowanG077 2y ago
      I think you have the wrong impression. Apple M2 does not have hw ray tracing. M3 and M4 do.
  - porphyra 2y ago
    UE5 supports fully path traced lighting and Black Myth Wukong is a recent example.
  - jms55 2y ago
    > performance is only good if you have a current-generation GPU that cost at least $1k That's why I said games aren't currently designed with only pathtracing in mind, but in 3-5 years with faster hardware and better algorithms, we'll probably start to see it be more widespread. That's typically how graphics usually develop; something that's only for high end GPUs eventually becomes accessible to everyone. SSAO used to be considered extremely demanding, and now it's accessible to even the weakest phone GPU with good enough quality. Again the fact that it's feasible at all, even if it requires a $1000 GPU, is amazing! 5 years ago real time path tracing would've been seen as impossible. > The way it went for CP2077 makes your "70% usable" claim seem like quite an exaggeration Based on the raw frame timing numbers and temporal stability, I don't think it is. RT GI is currently usually around ~4ms, which is at the upper edge of usable. However the temporal stability is usually the bigger issue - at current ray counts, with current algorithms, either noise or slow response times is an inevitable tradeoff. Hence, 70% usable. But with another few years of improvements, we'll probably get to the point where we can get it down to ~2.5ms with the current stability, or 4ms and much more stable. Which would be perfectly usable.
- deleted 2y ago
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porphyra 2y ago
Hmm I watched the video [1] and in the games where it had an unambiguous improvement, the improvement in reflection quality is extremely stark and noticeable. Anecdotally, when I was playing Black Myth Wukong recently, there were some shiny environments where full path tracing really made a huge difference. So I guess it's just a "gimmick" in that relatively few games properly take advantage of this currently, rather than the effect not being good enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNH0NyN8K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNH0NyN8K8
- adastra22 2y ago
  Using raytracing on a very recent, high end game that has been designed for raytracing has an extremely noticeable positive improvement on visual quality. Wukong is a perfect example. Unfortunately most people’s experience with raytracing is turning it on for a game that was not designed for it, but it was added through a patch, which results in worse lighting. Why? Because the rasterized image includes baked-in global illumination using more light sources than whatever was hastily put together for the raytracing patch.
  - IntelMiner 2y ago
    The first game I encountered with RayTracing support was World of Warcraft "Classic"'s Burning Crusade launch a couple years back. WoW Burning Crusade launched in *2006* originally. The "Classic" re-release of the game uses the modern engine but with the original game art assets and content. Does it do anything in the 'modern' WoW game? Probably! In Classic though all it did was tank my framerate. Since then I also played the unimaginable disaster that was Cyberpunk 2077. For as "pretty" as I suppose the game looked I can't exactly say if the ray tracing improved anything
    - adastra22 2y ago
      What's perhaps not obvious is that if you take a 2006 game and "add" raytracing, there's no relevant information available for the raytracer. Whatever original light sources were used to bake in global illumination does not exist in the game assets used for rasterization. In the best case the original art assets can be used to create raytracing scenes, but it's not as straightforward as it might seem, and most conversions are pretty sloppy. If you want to see what raytracing can do, I'd only look at very, very recent UE5 titles that are designed for raytracing from the ground-up.

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.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > For the foreseeable future, games will still need to look good without fully path traced lighting. And in 7-10 years when the software stack is matured, we'll be thanking ourselves for doing this in hardware the right way. I don't understand why planning for the future is considered so wasteful - this is an architecture Apple can re-use for future hardware and scale to larger GPUs. Maybe it doesn't make sense for Macs today, but in 5 years that may no longer be the case. Now people don't have to throw away a perfectly good computer made in these twilight years of Moore's law. For non-games applications like Blender or Cinema4D, having hardware-accelerated ray tracing and denoising is already a game-changer. Instead of switching between preview and render layers, you can interact with a production-quality render in real time. Materials are properly emissive and transmissive, PBR and normal maps composite naturally instead of needing different settings, and you can count the time it takes before getting an acceptable frame in milliseconds, not minutes. I don't often give Apple the benefit of the doubt, but hardware-accelerated ray tracing is a no-brainer here. If they aren't going to abandon Metal, and they intend to maintain their minuscule foothold in PC gaming, they have to lay the groundwork for future titles to get developed on. They have the hardware investment, they have the capital to invest in their software, and their competitors like Khronos (apparently) and Microsoft both had ray tracing APIs for years when Apple finally released theirs.
  - rowanG077 2y ago
    I think you have the wrong impression. Apple M2 does not have hw ray tracing. M3 and M4 do.
- porphyra 2y ago
  UE5 supports fully path traced lighting and Black Myth Wukong is a recent example.
- jms55 2y ago
  > performance is only good if you have a current-generation GPU that cost at least $1k That's why I said games aren't currently designed with only pathtracing in mind, but in 3-5 years with faster hardware and better algorithms, we'll probably start to see it be more widespread. That's typically how graphics usually develop; something that's only for high end GPUs eventually becomes accessible to everyone. SSAO used to be considered extremely demanding, and now it's accessible to even the weakest phone GPU with good enough quality. Again the fact that it's feasible at all, even if it requires a $1000 GPU, is amazing! 5 years ago real time path tracing would've been seen as impossible. > The way it went for CP2077 makes your "70% usable" claim seem like quite an exaggeration Based on the raw frame timing numbers and temporal stability, I don't think it is. RT GI is currently usually around ~4ms, which is at the upper edge of usable. However the temporal stability is usually the bigger issue - at current ray counts, with current algorithms, either noise or slow response times is an inevitable tradeoff. Hence, 70% usable. But with another few years of improvements, we'll probably get to the point where we can get it down to ~2.5ms with the current stability, or 4ms and much more stable. Which would be perfectly usable.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

porphyra 2y ago

Hmm I watched the video [1] and in the games where it had an unambiguous improvement, the improvement in reflection quality is extremely stark and noticeable. Anecdotally, when I was playing Black Myth Wukong recently, there were some shiny environments where full path tracing really made a huge difference. So I guess it's just a "gimmick" in that relatively few games properly take advantage of this currently, rather than the effect not being good enough. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNH0NyN8K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNH0NyN8K8

adastra22 2y ago
Using raytracing on a very recent, high end game that has been designed for raytracing has an extremely noticeable positive improvement on visual quality. Wukong is a perfect example. Unfortunately most people’s experience with raytracing is turning it on for a game that was not designed for it, but it was added through a patch, which results in worse lighting. Why? Because the rasterized image includes baked-in global illumination using more light sources than whatever was hastily put together for the raytracing patch.
- IntelMiner 2y ago
  The first game I encountered with RayTracing support was World of Warcraft "Classic"'s Burning Crusade launch a couple years back. WoW Burning Crusade launched in *2006* originally. The "Classic" re-release of the game uses the modern engine but with the original game art assets and content. Does it do anything in the 'modern' WoW game? Probably! In Classic though all it did was tank my framerate. Since then I also played the unimaginable disaster that was Cyberpunk 2077. For as "pretty" as I suppose the game looked I can't exactly say if the ray tracing improved anything
  - adastra22 2y ago
    What's perhaps not obvious is that if you take a 2006 game and "add" raytracing, there's no relevant information available for the raytracer. Whatever original light sources were used to bake in global illumination does not exist in the game assets used for rasterization. In the best case the original art assets can be used to create raytracing scenes, but it's not as straightforward as it might seem, and most conversions are pretty sloppy. If you want to see what raytracing can do, I'd only look at very, very recent UE5 titles that are designed for raytracing from the ground-up.