GART: Games and Applications using RayTracing

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Pretty sure the only unique advantage with RTXDI/ReSTIR is that you can use it to apply shadow rays for every light sources in the scene and temporal reuse of shadow rays is a major component of the technique. You could already render thousands of dynamic light sources if you did clustered forward shading and support arbitrary primitive shapes for light sources too with linearly transformed cosines ...
 
Pretty sure the only unique advantage with RTXDI/ReSTIR is that you can use it to apply shadow rays for every light sources in the scene and temporal reuse of shadow rays is a major component of the technique. You could already render thousands of dynamic light sources if you did clustered forward shading and support arbitrary primitive shapes for light sources too with linearly transformed cosines ...
Personally i'm quite disappointed from the results of city night scene, which is the ideal test case. Yes, it can do may lights with shadows, but shadows end up so blurry there is no visual advantage over using unshadowed lights as is common in current games.
Now i wonder if the better solution is to use unshadowed lights at the distance (eventually using such area light approaches you mention), and using RT only close up and where it really matters.
Whatever, it does not look like things becoming easier anytime soon. It just works? Maybe, after lots of efforts.
 
did anyone here check the Resident Evil 8 RT on PS5? I spot 4 RT feature sets being used. I'm in doubt about two of them, but the other two seem legit (reflections and illumination). At 60fps..
 
The game is using RT on 1/4th-1/8th res reflections and it seems to be doing something with GI but it's hard to tell if it's actually using RT for that - no official information is given AFAIK.

And it doesn't hold 60.

Also of note - Crysis Remastered runs at 60 while using its s/w RT which doesn't even use RT h/w. Not sure why getting to 60 in a game which does use it would be a big deal.
 
At this point i can understand why some are underwhelmed by ray tracing so far. Things like spiderman, RE etc with their 'checkbox rt feature' dont really give a good impression on what the technology really can do.
 
At this point i can understand why some are underwhelmed by ray tracing so far. Things like spiderman, RE etc with their 'checkbox rt feature' dont really give a good impression on what the technology really can do.
Spider-man's use of RT reflections is actually impressive in the context. I can't think of other game which would use them in such quantity and quality. Then again it's a platform exclusive which makes it hard to compare to other implementations.
 
Spider-man's use of RT reflections is actually impressive in the context. I can't think of other game which would use them in such quantity and quality. Then again it's a platform exclusive which makes it hard to compare to other implementations.

Its probably the best PS5 has to offer, but falls short seeing what more substantional ray tracing can offer to the end user. I mean, its just for reflections (being a lesser variant of it), i can understand why people are so against the tech as opposed to a good implemented SSR solution.
We had great rt reflections in 2018 (if not better) when RT made its first consumer appearance in games.
 
I mean, its just for reflections (being a lesser variant of it), i can understand why people are so against the tech as opposed to a good implemented SSR solution.
Nah, it's that one game where SSR falls completely flat on its face as there are many scenes where reflections can't use screen space data. It is a good example of RT done right.
 
Yes, the rationale makes sense. You can obviously makes games run faster with rasterization but only under particular limitations that we’ve come to accept as normal.
I assume the reference there is with respect to baking lights versus dynamic runtime lighting - in which having a lot of dynamic lighting sources will choke a lot of engines and scaling will eventually work it's favor towards RTRT.
 
It just works? Maybe, after lots of efforts.
The question is not whether it just works, but rather whether it's faster / easier to maintain and debug / and more universal solution than all the technics it replaces - clustered shading / arbitrary primitive shapes for light sources with linearly transformed cosines / AO / shadow maps / diffuse shadows / contact shadows, etc, etc.
And it does look way more promising than tons of independent hacks under this angle.

I can't think of other game which would use them in such quantity and quality
I love Insomniacs and I had a great pleasure finishing both Spider-Mans on PS5 with RT, but there are some quite obvious tweaks they've made to make it look shinier and better.
They have tuned roughness for many materials by a lot so that there are way more smooth surfaces than what one may expect to see in real world, this highly biases their materials towards unrealistically shiny and polished materials.
Luckily they perfectly knew that and added non reflective dirt / scratches textures layers to materials to make them look somewhat more realistic.
Still there are tons of scenes, which would have benefited from a higher roughness cutoff.
RT in Spider-Man was tweaked to make it as obvious to spot as possible (but not realistic imo) and that's OK, but some people might prefer the more realistic look of materials in WDL with specular occlusion and way higher roughtness cutoff.
And only Cyberpunk features the best of too worlds - tons of shiny and fully mirror surfaces, complex materials, specular occlusion and no roughness cutoff at all to my surprise (so reflections work for all materials in the game).
 
I love Insomniacs and I had a great pleasure finishing both Spider-Mans on PS5 with RT, but there are some quite obvious tweaks they've made to make it look shinier and better.
They have tuned roughness for many materials by a lot so that there are way more smooth surfaces than what one may expect to see in real world, this highly biases their materials towards unrealistically shiny and polished materials.
Luckily they perfectly knew that and added non reflective dirt / scratches textures layers to materials to make them look somewhat more realistic.
Still there are tons of scenes, which would have benefited from a higher roughness cutoff.
RT in Spider-Man was tweaked to make it as obvious to spot as possible (but not realistic imo) and that's OK, but some people might prefer the more realistic look of materials in WDL with specular occlusion and way higher roughtness cutoff.

What i ment on my post above.
Its called optimizing, they had no choice really. Get the most out of the hardware. If it impresses their audience (which it always will, their target audience has not seen RT in effect in their games before), then its a good enough solution. Ray tracing is about it being realistic and accurate, and yes, its quite easy to have alot of obvious reflections in a city like new york.....

And only Cyberpunk features the best of too worlds - tons of shiny and fully mirror surfaces, complex materials, specular occlusion and no roughness cutoff at all to my surprise (so reflections work for all materials in the game).

Yes and thats just talking reflections in that game (doing them as should), but also many other even more impressive RT effects, all at once. And thats what DF calls true next generation graphics.
 

Metro Exodus redux. Theoretically looks great, and I love the idea of faking the lighting as least as possible, making the workflow easier for artists. But god a few times the noise, from a 3090 at max settings, a reminder that there's limitations still, and anything below 4k is a mess. Making a weird crawling soft film grain effect is just not desireable, which is a shame as the 2060 performance implies this could be ported to the PS5/Series X even if image quality is questionable (maybe the S could run it at 30fps 900p?). And it comes with the other caveats of course, no full roughness value coverage, and of course no foliage (the big one).

Still, an excellent job overall, rather shockingly well done really, and a free upgrade is a free upgrade. I'm looking forward to the presentation, especially on their recursive temporal bounces, as those look much better done than that initial UE5 presentation we saw over a year ago. No pitch blacks just out of the way of light here, at least sofar as I saw. I really wonder how they managed that with one bounce from screenspace, as it doesn't seem possible in complex areas. But then, maybe the video (however it was sourced) didn't show areas that don't work, or the level design just works for this limitation. I haven't played it yet as I've been waiting for a new GPU (any day now, yep, any day).
 
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I wonder which of the bigger developers will be the first one releasing a game built from the ground up with ray tracing. Could it be 4A Games?
 
I wonder which of the bigger developers will be the first one releasing a game built from the ground up with ray tracing. Could it be 4A Games?

Metro exodus enhanced edition is technically first? It ships a flavor of game only supporting ray tracing next week. Of course the old game still can be played with non dxr hw.
 
Metro exodus enhanced edition is technically first? It ships a flavor of game only supporting ray tracing next week. Of course the old game still can be played with non dxr hw.
It is technically first (AAA title) and given the effort, I do wonder if other developers would be willing to follow this path. I would like to see some of the older titles do this for a remaster, then what we've seen so far.

I think non-AAA would go to Quake RTX and Minecraft RTX which are both path tracers IIRC
 
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