With any new contributor, you never know what their level of understanding is. Some people quote articles and ideas they don't really understand, so until one's picked up on what they know, one has to evaluate. We just had a noob posting excerpts in a vague argument regards Wii U, for example. You'll have just have to bare with that if you feel I'm talking down to you - I approach all info from the basis that you never know what someone knows and there's no harm in going down to the basics
Not really. I'm not seeing anything in your argument to convince me XB1 is better at SVO than PS4. I'm not sure that's entirely on topic either.
I'm sorry I thought you said this...
If the consoles differ in their PRT capabilities,that'll mean one should be able to handle SVO a little better, but how much better?
I thought you were agreeing. It seems you've ignored or didn't see some of the questions so perhaps that's why you didn't see anything in my argument. So here...
Unless you can think of another reason[other than eSRAM] why else the X1 would have an advantage in writes, and writes only?
I'm saying I can only think of the eSRAM and the tile/untile features on the DMEs. And PRTs in particular are what accelerates SVO cone tracing.
Vernacular language is rarely exact. I read it as "ray tracing [of a scene] via [use of] parametric surfaces" because that fits the info most comfortably.
Right and that's how I read it too. But that's not good enough to just stop there. I thought you were a stickler for language
Let's talk about that.
If that's the case, you would have to ask yourself, what type of ray tracing uses parametric surfaces
to achieve ray tracing? Doesn't make much sense, does it? It's entirely backwards. Although SVO
cone tracing might fit because SVO uses a cone which could be considered a parametric surface...
Taking the example as raytracing a CSG scene, you don't need to read any content, save some positions and dimensions. So, for example, rendering a million marbles procedurally would consist almost entirely of writes to the ESRAM to create the framebuffer. The quote doesn't actually explain why XB1 would be faster, so it's not much use in understanding the advantage and whether that advantage is applicable to SVO.
Ok so you're saying it's either misused, mistranslated, misquoted, or just a weird vernacular language phrase and he actually
does mean ray tracing parametric surfaces? Fair enough, it's entirely possible. But on the topic of wordage we should be a little careful here, because in relation to his phrase it makes all the difference in the world.
First I need to point out that your example of "rendering a million marbles" is not something that's typically referred to as procedural generation. That's usually referred to as
instancing which is quite a bit different from procedural generation as it is known and used the large majority of the time(tessellation, procedural textures, terrain generation, etc). And most of those use parametric surfaces algorithms.
If it was a "missphrase", and all he meant was ray tracing a bunch of marbles, then why even bring it up? Ray tracing, as we both agreed, is out of the question and ray tracing spheres and cones alone is pretty useless to anyone not interested in seeing a marble and cone Youtube demo of basic ray tracing.
But procedural generation and SVO cone tracing are both doable and practical. And if we were to assume he's giving us practical and applicable examples as it may relate to the capabilities of each console and what we may actually see, and take his phrase as it was written, then literally he's saying that you are using a parametric surface[like a cone] to achieve ray tracing. And that can only lead me to believe he's referring to SVO cone tracing. I can't think of anything else that would fit.
Also, if you look up "ray tracing parametric surfaces"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/showciting;jsessionid=06DA1282D637478ECEB614D1576078D6?cid=228055
You're seeing a whole bunch of papers ALL referencing some type of voxel cone tracing.
In the slides OnQ duplicated in this thread, from GDC Europe.
Ok so no demonstration. That's a bummer. Personally I would love to have confirmation of this on
either console because it would be pretty amazing. It was a big bummer to find out UE4 yanked it out.
I will say this though, on the topic of demonstration. If one was to look at the trailer Black Tusk released at E3, and just imagine for a second that it wasn't pre-rendered(if it is, you gotta admit it's pretty low quality CG)....those reflection and that scene itself would be pretty ambitious to pull off using only screen spaced reflections or cube maps. Screen space reflections wouldn't work for something like that, and to pull off the dynamic fireworks with cube maps, would be one hell of an undertaking. So my guess is, if that's CG, that scene is likely not going to be in the game. If it's not, SVO cone tracing, could easily make that possible and we know UE4 had support for it. We also know Black Tusk is licensing it for the game as is other MS studios like Lionhead. Just food for thought.
Some people would, hence me being particular.
There's a lot of internet chatter that just quotes terms and phrases without understanding. There will be people who read Voxel Cone Ray Tracing and equate it to full-fledged ray-tracing because it sounds the same.
You cover a lot more stuff which is definitely OT. Feel free to take up the conversation in other threads. As I've said above, I'm not even sure this conversation belongs in this thread. We need to understand what exactly the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2, whether PS4 and XB1 are at different Tiers, and then how that affects PRT performance, to be able to consider implications on SVO's use in games across the two consoles.
Fair enough, and I was going to post it in its own thread but someone else brought the discussion in here before I could. However the answer to the thread title, when it all comes down to it, might just be SVO cone tracing, so how off topic is it? In the end what it all comes down to is what the spec differences actually achieve in terms of graphics or software techniques, no? That's what matters.