GART: Games and Applications using RayTracing

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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.

Doom III ray traced shadows :)
 
is it a pure RT acceleration required only title though? Or is it just an optional add on?

As the three titles above require a RT accelerated GPU to even run

Ah i was reacting to your comment on wanting to see older titles getting a remaster (with ray tracing), and the first i thought of was Doom III :p
 
"Technically" won't cut it, though.
well I'm pretty sure they are way ahead of the curve here. If this new patch is successful, it may get them to drop the old rendering method for their new title. And just decide to go this way forward. This is something other studios may not do.
 
Dear tech god,

I wish for BF6 to be Raytracing and DX12 Ultimate exclusive as well.

It won't happen, but I can still wish for it.
 
well I'm pretty sure they are way ahead of the curve here. If this new patch is successful, it may get them to drop the old rendering method for their new title. And just decide to go this way forward. This is something other studios may not do.

Of course they'll drop older PCs, one way or another, as long as it works on the consoles of course, and they're not shipping to Switch 2 or whatever.

This looks good, one spatial bounce that's recursive seems possible with hardware RT as long as it's not interactive foliage. I think you could get this to run on Series S with a low enough primary resolution, though maybe they'll want 2SPP for that case because... well that noise (or cone tracing of course). But "we're going to support every old PC indefinitely for triple A games" doesn't sound right.

Also, yeah now I can see the one spatial recursive bounce. You can visualize it as the light going back and forth infinitely, but only between two surfaces, not further and further around corners at all. Which means there's a huge jump in contrast around those corners where there obviously shouldn't be. Just look at the pitch black indirect shadows in bright sunlit areas at times. Still a major limitation there, but you can overcome that with some art and cleverness. Just apply other lighting, ambient, probes, whatever, and use the same bounce to access albedo and you can do a complex ambient occlusion pass at the same time.
 
Crysis Remastered PC Update 2.1.2 Release Notes

General

Experimental RayTracing Boost mode has been added.
  • Enabled RT reflections on nearly all surfaces in game.
  • Enabled Ray randomization for proper support of rough surfaces.
  • About 5% of specular reflectance has been added by default to all surfaces.
Developer Note:

During the development of Crysis Remastered, the team came up with the concept of adding a boost to RayTracing. This boost mode is more of a fun/experimental feature that we wanted to bring to all the RayTracing enthusiasts out there, to give more effects with minimal impact on performance. This option has been added to the in-game Graphic settings menu and can only be activated when Global Raytracing option is enabled.
 

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).

Wow, did not expect this from just an 'upgrade'. All limitations gone and done right. Wonder how they do the caching.
Guess i'll give the game another chance (felt a bit lost in open world and annoyed from helping hand orders of wife).
Now all i need is a proper GPU :D
 
"Instead, we have introduced a raytraced probe grid as part of a system known as Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination (DDGI). It is based heavily on and indeed uses much of the same shader technology as NVIDIA’s RTXGI SDK. These technologies act as an approximate GI term that can be added to the RTGI light sources themselves."
So they do fully-featured per pixel GI for the first bounce and use updated with RT probes for the following infinity bounces. The results look very good as was expected: https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2185727/
RE VIII seems to be using just DDGI aka RTXGI.
 
"Instead, we have introduced a raytraced probe grid as part of a system known as Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination (DDGI). It is based heavily on and indeed uses much of the same shader technology as NVIDIA’s RTXGI SDK. These technologies act as an approximate GI term that can be added to the RTGI light sources themselves."
Would be interesting to mix in DDGI samples instead traces for lower spec HW or during demanding scenery (seen 3070 goes down to 30fps).
Maybe could also compare RT result to DDGI per pixel, mark error, reproject, and save up some rays next frame where error is small.
But maybe they already did such things for Series X.
 
"Instead, we have introduced a raytraced probe grid as part of a system known as Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination (DDGI). It is based heavily on and indeed uses much of the same shader technology as NVIDIA’s RTXGI SDK. These technologies act as an approximate GI term that can be added to the RTGI light sources themselves."
So they do fully-featured per pixel GI for the first bounce and use updated with RT probes for the following infinity bounces. The results look very good as was expected: https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/2185727/
RE VIII seems to be using just DDGI aka RTXGI.

That explains the grid-like spacial quantization DF did spot at some points. Also means the "infinite bounces" are far from the real deal.

This is kind of like Control's RT gi, but the probes are rendered dynamically with RT. Seems like one of the most seamless paths to evolve an engine's indirect lighting system if it already uses probes... Gotta wonder if that won't become a standard aproach. Nvidia was on to somethinf afterall...
 
I've looked at some comparisons and I'm not sure I'd actually want to play the Enhanced version of Metro over the original with RT enabled in all cases. Most of Metro's indoor scenes have a good atmosphere with their darkness, and I do find more of the environment being lit up in the Enhanced version kind of being detrimental to the game.
For example this video.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwPVVU3tBU4
 
Most of Metro's indoor scenes have a good atmosphere with their darkness
Looks like you could get this back with adjusting brightness / contrast / gamma. I wish modern flat screens would still have turning knobs for that. Digging it up from some shitty display hud is cumbersome, games mostly offer only gamma, driver settings too cumbersome as well :(
 
Gotta wonder if that won't become a standard aproach. Nvidia was on to somethinf afterall...
Wasn't probe grids the standard long before NV claimed innovation here? Some games had these dynamic even.
AFAIK, the only new contribution from DDGI was using depth map per probe to limit light leaking, which is quite an obvious idea IMO.
 
Wasn't probe grids the standard long before NV claimed innovation here? Some games had these dynamic even.
AFAIK, the only new contribution from DDGI was using depth map per probe to limit light leaking, which is quite an obvious idea IMO.

Yeah, the "RTXGI" stuff is hardly new (see Quantum Break and The Division for the actual origin) in fact the RTXGI stuff altogether is super weird and not very useful. The low spatial resolution for dynamic lights just doesn't work at all, it looks blotchy and awful; continuously recasting rays onto mostly static geometry is a complete waste; and the whole thing doesn't even have stuff like Remedy's sparse grids from the original papers. At most there's a handful of useful tricks here or there for the now industry standard of probe grids, but that's about it.

I've looked at some comparisons and I'm not sure I'd actually want to play the Enhanced version of Metro over the original with RT enabled in all cases. Most of Metro's indoor scenes have a good atmosphere with their darkness, and I do find more of the environment being lit up in the Enhanced version kind of being detrimental to the game.
For example this video.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwPVVU3tBU4

Yeah, that is one problem with moving into stuff like raytracing before all the tools are developed for art directing it. The same problems were encountered by Pixar and etc. when they all started going raytracing about a decade ago, a lot of the artists were bothered by how little control over the scene they had in comparison to their old raster based renderers. But there's tradeoffs with everything, and with Hollywood already having developed a grab bag of tools for art directing tracing stuff games shouldn't have nearly as much of the same hill to climb there.
 
Yeah, the "RTXGI" stuff is hardly new (see Quantum Break and The Division for the actual origin)
I'd predate this much further - Valves Ambient Cube in HL2, and even the non directional light grid in Quake 3 (IIRC). Some early Farcry had probegrid with dynamic TOD, but guess there were similar things before that.
Agree about the downsides. Moving those to just the second bounce surely helps a lot.
 
Wasn't probe grids the standard long before NV claimed innovation here?
Of cause they were, probes have been pretty much a standard solution for GI since Far Cry 3 and even in games with static lightmaps, such as "The Last of Us 2", there are probes for animated and dynamic geometry to ground them up in the prebaked environment.

Static probes can be relatively easily upgraded to dynamic solution like RTXGI with minimal performance impact, that's the whole point of RTXGI.

Benefits of dynamically updated probes are quite obvious - less light leaking with depth tracking, support for fully dynamic lighting, support for destructible environments, color bleeding, "infinity" bounces at minimal fixed perf cost due to decoupled shading.

Drawbacks are obvious too - probes can't capture high frequency shadow/ light details, shadows, etc since probes grid is too coarse for that and will always be, light leaks that sometimes happen even with dynamic probes.

Combining probes with full fledged per pixel GI makes a perfect sense since per pixel GI is capable of fixing all the probes flaws and DDGI fixes limited amount of bounces with per pixel GI.

That's not the first time we are seeing per pixel GI in combination with probes or other lighting cache. Cyberpunk adds full fledged per pixel GI with Diffuse lighting from the sky and area lights on top of the static probes. Control does local RT GI on top of cone tracing into prebaked voxels.
 
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