Carmack on Ray Tracing & Rasterization

Damn, real next gen is here!

 

At a price of at least $2200 for the GPUs alone.

 

Well 90% of this footage looked underwhelming due to day time and last gen assets but in night time and rainy weather, yep it's something alright.

 

13 minute video, 10 ads... yeah not watching.

 

I don't agree on this one. Just because it's pretty, shiny and crystal clear it doesn't mean that it can't look better. I mean, the fact that the car isn't even reflected is way too distracting for me. Or is it reflected and because of the angle I don't see it? I've watched the video looking for a better angle, maybe, but I don't find it.

 

There is reflections off the cars. At least with the chromed out ones where you can readily see the buildings behind the car being reflected off the trunk area.

 

You're not alone on that. I mean, it's a decent hack but that's about as far as I would go in saying that. Ray tracing is what solves those edge cases and brings to life effects in a way that these type of reflections would restrict against. It's a hack that isn't perfect and isn't universal. which is fine, but when we talk about the upper end of where we need to go for 'ultra' settings, those are the areas that we are addressing. What needs to be understood is that the introduction of ray tracing has successfully created a larger divide between the settings of low, med, high and ultra.

No one likes to see that our frame rates are being bombed, or our resolution being hamstrung as a result of it, but the quality is undeniably more consistent than what a lot of these hacks provide; which is the purpose of ultra settings.

That being said, the rate at which hybrid ray tracing features continue to evolve at is moving at a much faster pace than people recognize. I think a lot of people are still stuck at that low performance RTX games launch, and perhaps have not taken the time to see what's happening lately. The recent video here #367 on DF's breakdown of RTX for Control is a great piece on how they were able to get a hybrid Ray tracing to supplement their Voxel GI to solve a lot of their leaking light/shadow issues, RT Reflections, and RT shadows all running in unison in a completely breakable and deformable environment on a single 2080TI card at 1080p60.

I think there's still a long way to go here for hybrid RT use cases, and I suspect we'll continue to see more effects and more usage but requiring less hardware as they get better at optimizing RT implementations.

 

This. People are fixated on the early RTX solutions instead of looking at them as a first data point of the following many years of data points as new ideas develop. The lack of faith people have in the power of the software developers is disturbing.

 

That's because they are lazy

 

Cyberpunk E3 demo ran at only 1080p Ultra settings with RTX on from a Nvidia Titan RTX, I7 8700k and 32GB ram.
https://wccftech.com/cyberpunk-2077-e3-2019-demo-ran-1080p-ultra-rtx-on/
https://wccftech.com/cyberpunk-2077-e3-2019-demo-specs/
Unless AMD's RT solution is leaps and bounds better, I just don't see next gen consoles turning the feature on without dipping into 720p-900p territory.

 

Early optimizations and code, as stated by the developer. Same thing happened in Metro, Battlefield V and Tomb Raider, now they run 1440p60 max settings on a 2080Ti, or 1080p60 max on a 2070 or sometimes even a 2060. Wait for final code before you judge.

They don't need to run the feature on to it's max quality, medium quality can be sufficient.

 

This whole quote (especially the bolded part) is written by a some one who doesn't have a clue about what he's talking about (no surprise.. he's the UI coordinator not a one of lighting/engine devs at CDPR). Atleast it is admitted that Nvidia is going to "supply" the code (like all TWIMTBP games..it's part of the whole package). Anyways..based on the 2 bogus "RTX" screenshots released and the ridiculous answer from another CDPR dev in NVidia's own promo video ("we just want to make things reflect nicely!" 3:51 long video labeled "How Cyberpunk 2077 Will Utilize RTX" discusses RTX for 10 secs..amazing) I'm willing to bet my left nutsack that DXR isn't even implemented in the game yet.
I'm sure that a 2080 will be enough when all things are in place next year.

 

1440p on a 2080ti and it's only on current gen titles. Since Cyberpunk is cross gen and far more demanding, I don't expect much miracle.

 

A title using raytracing effectively (not necessarily Cyberpunk as it wasn't built from the ground up wit RT in mind) is by definition a next-gen title, even if it also has a current-gen version. You could run a PS3 game on a PS2 at a low framerate, low resolution - that doesn't make the PS3 game a PS2-gen title. You can run whatever raytraced game on compute on a PS4 at a dreadfully slow framerate and resolution, but that doesn't make it a PS4 title. If a game targets features present in future consoles and absent on current consoles, it's a next-gen title.

 

I assume he's talking about RT GI for the skylight and how some of the light sources are also RT GI based? This along with RT reflection and AO can be extremely taxing, otherwise there's absolutely no way a 2080 ti level card could only run it at 1080p and the rest of that rig is no joke either.

 

Probably a hyperbole statement, but worth mentioning none the less ..

https://gamingbolt.com/ps5s-zen-2-p...jlo8h-zxL6NRKB3qQXcy6RZV0sLkU7Ihk_AuhYpNFmASY

 

I disagree somewhat, what you described is at best a hybrid title, a next gen featured game with current gen assets or current gen asset game with next gen features. For me a pure next gen title comprise of the vast majority of its features and assets that can not be run on a current gen console. I mean you wouldn't call all those Nvidia Gamework featured multiplatforms next gen titles would you?

 

What if next-gen assets are no different to this gen? We're already at a very high quality. What if next gen is nothing more than this gen but with with photorealistic lighting? Would you deny it was a new generation at all?

 

You don't consider call of duty ghosts as being next gen right?

When ray tracing isn't just a bolt on to get people to purchase your software, then, yes I would start to consider us in the next gen. Ie; when the next consoles are deployed and we see the features in full constant use. This is a transition period at this moment (but still mainly marketing), but I think as we see with Control there will be a variety of ways to implement ray tracing into our existing stack, the launch methods employed (bolt-ons) are likely the easiest and fastest way to get ray tracing into the game, but at a huge penalty to performance. It's nice to prove that brute force works, but it's about as elegant as Super Sampled AA. We know that's the best quality, but no one uses it.

As developers spend more time to use ray tracing in conjunction with our current T&L techniques (perhaps just to augment them to handle edge cases in which traditional methods are too costly to employ), we will get high performance hybrids which I suspect is where we all want to be for next gen.

Ray tracing is an effective tool for developers to hybridize what they are working on, the idea of full screen real time ray tracing was never the intention and people hoping that would be the norm will be disappointed.

 

Hope not. As much as I love Red Dead 2 and think it looks amazing it's assets and especially low poly characters would be a big disappointment if that's what we get next gen.