A Generational Leap in Graphics [2020] *Spawn*

[Shortbread]

I think a lot of the apprehension against RT especially within the console space, is that RT usage is expensive. A certain amount of console gamers (even PC gamers) simply want greater performance and/or prettier shaders. Some folks really do like precomputed and/or baked lighting and shadowing assets simply because the artist has greater artistic control over the assets having a certain look, which RT can change visually. Me personally, I’m an eye-candy whore, and having RT just makes things look better. But I do respect those opinions from gamers wanting greater FPS performance over RT... or any other penalizing IQ/performance feature.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

I just pulled two screenshots, both from Alex's videos in similar situations.

Watch Dogs looks significantly nicer to my eyes. And actually I've seen it look better at night

 

[BillSpencer]

I agree with @pjbliverpool here. Cyberpunk is the best looking game this year. This is something that time will vindicate when more people have the Hardware to play this game - AKA a gpu that can competently do RT (the eventual next en versions should be interesting). I think the General lowbrow luddite septicism across the Internet against ray tracing is the only reason why this game is not being so widely praised on PC graphically. People unfortunately dislike ray tracing due to memes or stupidly associate Graphics rendering progress via ray tracing with console wars or worse, IHV wars.. When to me, a game looking good due to RT is just 25 years progress and hard work where the RT Revolution is here: something i have wanted to see for so long.

In about a year there should be quite a lot of console RT games on the market, maybe even more so than on PC.
As for consoles, with the console call of duty game, RT looks dope, but 120fps is maybe even better for the game. Same with Spiderman, the RT looks amazing, but I am happy that they offer a 60fps ray tracing option, and I hope that future games also aim for 60fps RT because while it is amazing, I would not want to choose between 30fps RT or 60fps non-RT.

 

[cwjs]

how on earth are those similar situations?

 

[pjbliverpool]

I just pulled two screenshots, both from Alex's videos in similar situations.

Watch Dogs looks significantly nicer to my eyes. And actually I've seen it look better at night

View attachment 5149 View attachment 5150

I'm not sure comparing one of the worst still shots of CB2077 to one of the best still shots of WD:L is a great way to conclude that one looks better than the other. I do agree that maxed out WD:L can look gorgeous and it's clearly in the top tier of game graphics currently, but I fail to see why you think CB2077 fails on art direction while WD:L somehow succeeds.

 

[Deleted member 86764]

I'm not sure comparing one of the worst still shots of CB2077 to one of the best still shots of WD:L is a great way to conclude that one looks better than the other. I do agree that maxed out WD:L can look gorgeous and it's clearly in the top tier of game graphics currently, but I fail to see why you think CB2077 fails on art direction while WD:L somehow succeeds.

I don't think either are a work of art, just that the implementation of Watch Dogs is superior. Conversely, the feature set of 2077 is more complete.

Edit: I did not look for the worst of one and the best of the other. I pulled the first similar screenshots I could find. I have no agenda here.

 

[chris1515]

There are better implementations of single effects, but there's nowhere near the same complete package implementation in any other serious modern game. The very distant second place is control, which is also an amazing looking game.

Cyberpunk 2077 does everything, GI, shadows and reflections. MM is weaksauce RT compared to it.

 

[snc]

I mean I also think miles morales is a better looking game, but if you think it's as cutting edge technically you have a lot to learn about rendering.

The thread is "generational leap" not best art team, and the art team that's leveraging good procedural workflows, building on an (amazing) established base, better paid, and doing less crunch, is almost always going to punch above the engine's weight.

That doesn't make some nice tradeoffs in reflections magically more impressive than everything going on in cyberpunk.

ok see point but can we say that cyberpunk is cutting edge technicaly because we can turn on rt for reletions, shadows and gi, thats enough ? Maybe I can say techncialy Miles Morales is cutting edge because it's loading map in 2s and they reoslution reconstruction technic is so good that even 1440p rt mode looks sharp without dlss

 

[Dampf]

In terms of lighting, CP2077 is next gen with all its RT effects.

In terms of textures, draw distance and geometric detail, it is still a current gen game.

True next gen games will look even better than Cyberpunk, utilizing Sampler Feedback Streaming, Mesh Shaders and DirectStorage SSD streaming to their full potential. That alongside Raytracing and you have true next gen graphics.

Will probably take a while though

 

[chris1515]

After I think realtime rendering is a compromise and I think the best looking games will have the best compromises. I don't think we will see triangle based RT GI on consoles because it is too costly but GI predate raytracing in offline rendering and even if it is not as accurate or good there is some good compromise. RT GI will be only on PC version if the dev made the effort to develop it.

I think in city games triangle based RT reflection will be used because there is no good compromise at all but this is maybe too costly in nature with tons of vegetation at least on consoles. Same here out of city we will only see it on PC.

No idea for shadows if they will choose virtualised shadow maps, screen space shadows, capsule shadow and SSDO or RT and RTAO shadows.

https://graphics.pixar.com/library/PointBasedGlobalIlluminationForMovieProduction/paper.pdf

This method was used before raytracing on offline rendering movie. In game we have SVOGI or Voxel Cone tracing and maybe soon other GI Method.

GI but no raytracing at all

I just pulled two screenshots, both from Alex's videos in similar situations.

Watch Dogs looks significantly nicer to my eyes. And actually I've seen it look better at night

View attachment 5149 View attachment 5150

Watchdog Legions screenshot is under rain with raytracing reflection it is unfair to compare with Cyberpunk 2077.

EDIT: I think in one year, there will be better looking game than the current best looking games and the gap will be very visible.

 

[dten]

The RT difference is amazing. Saying 2077 is a next gen is somewhat subjective, but if people are expecting much better in a few years, they're gonna be disappointed if last gen is any indicator. Sure the most recent PS4 games look better than the best looking earlier ones such as Driveclub and AC Unity, but I can instantly tell from in game footage that they are all PS4 gen games. And console RT will improve, but they cannot match a 3080 even with 6-7 years of dev experience.

 

[chris1515]

The RT difference is amazing. Saying 2077 is a next gen is somewhat subjective, but if people are expecting much better in a few years, they're gonna be disappointed if last gen is any indicator. Sure the most recent PS4 games look better than the best looking earlier ones such as Driveclub and AC Unity, but I can instantly tell from in game footage that they are all PS4 gen games. And console RT will improve, but they cannot match a 3080 even with 6-7 years of dev experience.

Again RT is not the only way to do lighting, it is the best one but there are very good compromises out of specular reflection where no one find good compromise. For the moment there are no real PS5 and XSX games out of partially Demon's souls but we will see much better. Everything is cross gen.

Offline rendering movie had Global illumination for years without raytracing.

This is looking better than anything we have in realtime because this is offline rendering and there is GI without raytracing. Davy Jones and is crews used Point based Global illumination a method invented by Micheal Bunnell(ex Nvidia) for realtime rendering and used in 3 games by him but it was improved and become popular in offline rendering before pathtracing tooks it place because it was less work for artist.

https://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/gicourse2010/giai2010-05-michael_bunnell-slides.pdf

We have Voxel Cone tracing currently and maybe people will explore other way of doing GI.

 

[cwjs]

Offline rendering movie had Global illumination for years without raytracing.

This is looking better than anything we have in realtime because this is offline rendering and there is GI without raytracing. Davy Jones and is crews used Point based Global illumination a method invented by Micheal Bunnel(ex Nvidia) for realtime rendering and used in 3 games by him but it was improved and become popular in offline rendering before pathtracing tooks it place because it was less work for artist.
.

It's wrong to say that's without raytracing -- only the diffuse GI is provided by the point cloud GI approach, the rest of the image is provided by an entirely raytraced based renderer (renderman or whatever they use). On the paper, I'm not sure I understand the exact details, but it seems heavily bound by cloud complexity (says they cant at the time of the paper do anywhere near 1 point per tri, whereas the davy jones is presumably several million points.)

Since this is taking gi from points and using spherical harmonics to approximate gi, how is it different from something like unity's light probe approach?

Edit: i do think you're right that a lot of upcoming games will use non-rt methods for GI though -- lumen alone will probably account for a ton of shipped games that use a high end version of a more traditional GI approach.

 

[chris1515]

It's wrong to say that's without raytracing -- only the diffuse GI is provided by the point cloud GI approach, the rest of the image is provided by an entirely raytraced based renderer (renderman or whatever they use). On the paper, I'm not sure I understand the exact details, but it seems heavily bound by cloud complexity (says they cant at the time of the paper do anywhere near 1 point per tri, whereas the davy jones is presumably several million points.)

Since this is taking gi from points and using spherical harmonics to approximate gi, how is it different from something like unity's light probe approach?

Did I say this what we will use for realtime rendering? The game he used it were made for GPU before 2010 when he wrote the paper. We have SVOGI or Lumen. And the rendering offline approach was different using the same approximation for long range object but some microbuffer rasterization for midrange object and raytracing/raycasting for close range object.

But I don't say we will use this for realtime rendering. I said that RT is not the only method for GI. We have Voxel Cone tracing but maybe some people will come with better idea.

I am sure of one things when Mark Cerny did this slide, he was not thinking of triangle based raytracing.

 

[pjbliverpool]

Again RT is not the only way to do lighting, it is the best one but there are very good compromises out of specular reflection where no one find good compromise.

I suppose it's worth noting that RT can offer graphical improvements outside of the lighting model because it simplifies the development process, thus leaving more dev hours available for every other aspect of the presentation.

We don't see the benefit of that right now because every game - even on next gen consoles has an RT off mode. Hopefully more games later in the generation will be RT exclusive although ironically PC's may hold things back in that regard.

 

[chris1515]

I suppose it's worth noting that RT can offer graphical improvements outside of the lighting model because it simplifies the development process, thus leaving more dev hours available for every other aspect of the presentation.

We don't see the benefit of that right now because every game - even on next gen consoles has an RT off mode. Hopefully more games later in the generation will be RT exclusive although ironically PC's may hold things back in that regard.

Lumen doesn't use probe and it will help reduce development process like Nanite.

 

[Dampf]

although ironically PC's may hold things back in that regard.

That is true, but thankfully DXR can be run in software, although slow it could be still usable on evergreen hardware such as the 1060.

Honestly, I hope RT only games will happen sooner rather than later. It's better for the industry that way.

 

[pjbliverpool]

That is true, but thankfully DXR can be run in software, although slow it could be still usable on evergreen hardware such as the 1060.

Honestly, I hope RT only games will happen sooner rather than later. It's better for the industry that way.

Yep, as the owner of one of the fastest non-RT capable pieces of hardware on the market I'll be more than happy for it to be rendered obsolete.

 

[chris1515]

That is true, but thankfully DXR can be run in software, although slow it could be still usable on evergreen hardware such as the 1060.

Honestly, I hope RT only games will happen sooner rather than later. It's better for the industry that way.

I think triangle based RT only games will arrive next generation(PS6/Xbox Series 2).

 

[pjbliverpool]

I think triangle based RT only games will arrive next generation(PS6/Xbox Series 2).

I hope you're wrong but I suspect you're right.