Current Generation Games Analysis Technical Discussion [2022] [XBSX|S, PS5, PC]

[PSman1700]

Reality goes against these strange statement. So execuse me again, I really really don't get this.

Its not uncommmon for people to be 'afraid' of changes, in special in the technology space.

 

[DavidGraham]

First like i said HW RT shadows with Nanite is an inferior solution compared to virtual shadow maps

As I said earlier, RTXDI works well with Nanite, and it renders both RT lighting and shadows, with good performance.

Tekken 8 and Sillent hill 2 are 2023 games

No they are not, the deveopers didn't mention a release date and most publications expect at least a 2024 release date.

 

[chris1515]

As I said earlier, RTXDI works well with Nanite, and it renders both RT lighting and shadows, with good performance.


No they are not, the deveopers didn't mention a release date and most publications expect at least a 2024 release date.

SH2 Remake In Final Stages of Development - Rely on Horror

The president of Bloober Team, Piotr Babieno recently spoke about the development process for the upcoming Silent Hill 2 Remake.

www.relyonhorror.com

Silent Hill 2 Remake in Production Since 2019; Game is Currently in Late-Stage Production

Bloober Team President Piotr Babeno revealed that the Silent Hill 2 remake has been in production for 3 years and more interesting facts.

wccftech.com

Sillent Hill 2 is a 2023 title, the president of the Bloober team told the game is currently in late stage production during WSE Innovation day 2022(19 to 21 october 2011) an event with polish investor.

And there is a rumored release during July 2023 for Tekken 8...

And I don't talk about performance for RT shadows but of accuracy RTXDI will not make HW RT shadows sub pixel accurate like Virtual Shadow maps with Nanite content.

@PSman1700 the change aren't coming from HW-RT but from UE 5 Nanite. The disruption is coming from Epic. This is to AMD, Intel, Nvidia and DX RT API to change not the other way around.

 

[DavidGraham]

RTXDI will not make HW RT shadows sub pixel accurate like Virtual Shadow maps with Nanite content.

But shadow maps hog performance when many lights that cast shadows are used, in contrast RTXDI enables you to use hundreds of lights each casting accurate soft shadows, with AO, contact hardening and shadows from area lights and everything, for maybe a small drop in sub pixel accuracy, who even cares for that?

And there is a rumored release during July 2023 for Tekken 8...

No, according to news from 15 days ago, both are 2024, if not later, and we all know games gets delayed ALOT these days.

Series creator Katsuhiro Harada confirmed that the game is being built from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, with no Tekken 7 assets being reused, so it’s unlikely that the game will be hitting stores anytime soon, with most expectations being a late-2023 release at earliest, or a more realistic 2024 release.

Tekken 8 release date, demo, betas, and trailers

The Tekken 8 release date has now arrived, so here’s everything we knew leading up to the latest entry in this popular fighting game series.

www.pcgamesn.com

Silent Hill Townfall has no current release date or release window. The only thing we know is that Director Jon McKellan stated during the announcement stream that more would be shown in 2023. Based on that, we don't expect this game to come out next year, with 2024 being a possibility depending on what is shown next.

Silent Hill Townfall rumors: everything we know so far | Digital Trends

There are a few clues we've uncovered about this upcoming game. If you're ready to go back to Silent Hill, here's everything we know about Silent Hill Townfall.

www.digitaltrends.com

 

[Cynicalking]

Silent Hill Townfall has no current release date or release window. The only thing we know is that Director Jon McKellan stated during the announcement stream that more would be shown in 2023. Based on that, we don't expect this game to come out next year, with 2024 being a possibility depending on what is shown next.

Silent Hill Townfall rumors: everything we know so far | Digital Trends

There are a few clues we've uncovered about this upcoming game. If you're ready to go back to Silent Hill, here's everything we know about Silent Hill Townfall.

www.digitaltrends.com

This is another game, not SH2 Remake.

 

[Lurkmass]

RTXDI and virtual shadow mapping are designed to have two different goals in mind ...

RTXDI (ReSTIR) is a high quality direct lighting and shadowing solution which accounts for area lighting/shadowing too. Virtual shadow mapping has fewer scene restrictions (dynamic and Nanite heavy) while providing sub-pixel accurate hard shadows. RTXDI simply isn't an option if artists want both dynamic and Nanite heavy scenes in UE5. Using proxy geometry is going to cause graphical bugs and updating the acceleration structure with accurate meshes is too slow ...

 

[chris1515]

But shadow maps hog performance when many lights that cast shadows are used, in contrast RTXDI enables you to use hundreds of lights each casting accurate soft shadows, with AO, contact hardening and shadows from area lights and everything, for maybe a small drop in sub pixel accuracy, who even cares for that?



No, according to news from 15 days ago, both are 2024, if not later, and we all know games gets delayed ALOT these days.

Series creator Katsuhiro Harada confirmed that the game is being built from scratch in Unreal Engine 5, with no Tekken 7 assets being reused, so it’s unlikely that the game will be hitting stores anytime soon, with most expectations being a late-2023 release at earliest, or a more realistic 2024 release.

Tekken 8 release date, demo, betas, and trailers

The Tekken 8 release date has now arrived, so here’s everything we knew leading up to the latest entry in this popular fighting game series.

www.pcgamesn.com

Silent Hill Townfall has no current release date or release window. The only thing we know is that Director Jon McKellan stated during the announcement stream that more would be shown in 2023. Based on that, we don't expect this game to come out next year, with 2024 being a possibility depending on what is shown next.

Silent Hill Townfall rumors: everything we know so far | Digital Trends

There are a few clues we've uncovered about this upcoming game. If you're ready to go back to Silent Hill, here's everything we know about Silent Hill Townfall.

www.digitaltrends.com

Again this is the Bloober Team president saying to investor the game is in the late production stage not some journalist having no knowledge of the development state of the game. I don't care what DigitalTrends is saying they aren't Piotr Babeno... If you prefer believe some journalists good for you. I didn't say games will release first quarter 2023... The game developement of Silent Hill 2 began in 2019.

Same the reason pcgamesn journalist believe it is a 2024 game is not logic.

Same ask yourself why virtual shadow maps are faster than cascaded shadow maps... And VSM are faster with Nanite content than normal rasterized content.

EDIT: This is Silent Hill 2 not Silent Hill downfall the game using UE5

 

[PSman1700]

The disruption is coming from Epic. This is to AMD, Intel, Nvidia and DX RT API to change not the other way around.

Epic can do what they want, it wont and cant change what Sony, MS, NV, Intel, NV and others have pioneered. Sure in the PC space you can introduce new GPU's but consoles are stuck for a seven or more so years. HW RT aint going anywhere.

 

[chris1515]

Epic can do what they want, it wont and cant change what Sony, MS, NV, Intel, NV and others have pioneered. Sure in the PC space you can introduce new GPU's but consoles are stuck for a seven or more so years. HW RT aint going anywhere.

Where did I say they need to stop HW-RT? The problem is about API and flexibility not HW-RT. I didn't talk about Sony or Xbox because they are more flexible but probably not powerful enough to support HW-RT directly using Nanite content and miss some feature for traversal or sorting. And we don't know what are the limitation of consoles intersection engine for example. At least on BVH side, this is fully flexible from possibility to stream the BVH from the storage for static geometry, to partially refit the BVH and do some experimentation like this one for example.

https://gpuopen.com/download/publications/GPUOpen2022_FusedLOD.pdf

The problem is not HW-RT, this is how it is currently done(intersection and what is supported on the BVH node). I hope it will change in the future. Basically intersection need to be more flexible to support Nanite triangle and same for BVH node.

The problem is not accelerated intersection, accelerated BVH traversal but on what content HW acceleration is working. On the BVH side being able to do at least partially what is possible on consoles would help.

 

[PSman1700]

I didn't talk about Sony or Xbox because they are more flexible

Unfortunately thats not the whole story.

 

[chris1515]

Unfortunately thats not the whole story.

Again what are able to do the console is under NDA and not very clear. This is possible intersection engine are as limited than on PC only AABB and unique triangle format but this is not sure. For BVH we know they are very flexible but maybe like PC impossible to build BLAS with Nanite triangle. The problem consoles miss traversal acceleration and ray sorting and they need it on performance side for future consoles but not as rigid as it is currently on PC.

And PS5 and Xbox Series API are different from Raytracing open world in UE5 footnote page 66 and 67

One solution to that problem that we have for techniques that use ray tracing shaders on XSX is to use what we call “Specialized State Objects”:
Which means the high-level ray tracing pipeline is broken down internally into multiple different ray tracing pipelines based on ray-gen VGPR
And then we select the one we want to avoid paying the occupancy penalty all the time.
And this is not needed on PS5 because there are no ray tracing pipelines as such.
Each ray gen shader is just a regular compute shader with known resource allocations.

Therefore on Xbox compiler breaks down ray gen shader into two parts: before and after TraceRay call and generates a lot of instructions to save and the restore state.
On Xbox the state goes into scratch memory.
On PS5 we can allow spilling state to either LDS or scratch or just kept in registers.
We can specify exactly how much can spill into each category separately.
On AMD that state goes into LDS, but what other vendors do might be of course different.

EDIT: At least this is clear

Additional challenge is that, like I mentioned before, the BVH traversal on consoles is implemented as a regular compute shader and only AABB and triangle intersections are HW accelerated.
Which means rays are not going to be reordered to improve coherence by the hardware.
In other words, it means that basically a ray lives on the thread on which it was spawned.
Any further shader invocations or traversal will happen on this particular thread.
So calling different shaders in a wavefront will have a waterfall effect, and compiler will scalarize based on either shader table index or resource access.
And for traversal, it means all the threads that finished will be marked inactive, and the wave will wait for the slowest thread.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Dont forget that nVidia has updated the RT Cores with the Micro-Mesh Engine to use geometry compression. Hardware RT on a 4090 is now over 5x faster than the 2080TI and >10x better than the PS5. The pace of advancements has outpaced the software solutions. nVidia's RTX Racer uses a pathtracing engine and gets 1080p/60FPS.

That is absolutely insane. I remember when RDNA2 series came out and being blown away that amd just adding basic RT hw capability on the GPU made RT roughly 10 times faster than a pure software solution like the recent crysis 1 software remaster. And your telling me now that a 4090 is now 10 times faster than that?! (Roughly 100 times faster than where we started with purely software solutions)

4 years ago the idea of ray tracing technology in gaming hardware let alone consoles was seen as decades out and now we are at this point? Absolutely incredible. DLSS and FSR will absolutely help with feasibility of this in the future but the fact consoles are already doing it in limited fashion is still mind boggling

 

[DavidGraham]

like i said HW RT shadows with Nanite is an inferior solution compared to virtual shadow maps.

Not inferior, I disagree, VSM cost a lot of performance too, especially with lots of shadow casting lights, RT shadows can support hundreds of lights, area light shadows and translucent shadows, that makes it superior or in -the worst case- on equal footing with VSM (in terms of tradeoffs).

Virtual shadow mapping has fewer scene restrictions (dynamic and Nanite heavy) while providing sub-pixel accurate hard shadows.

VSM doesn't support area light shadows, and don't inherently do AO/Contact Hardening .. it's another hack. Yes RT shadows lack sub pixel accuracy compared to VSM with Nanite, but that's a very acceptable tradeoff.

Funny now you guys suddenly care about sub-pixel micro shadows, while ignoring scene wide changes that HW-RT bring in terms of GI accuracy, dyanmic GI on dynamic objects, more accurate, higher resolution reflections, off screen reflections, whole area light shadows, shadows from hundreds of lights, translucent shadows .. etc.

Using proxy geometry is going to cause graphical bugs

No more than using software Lumen causes you to lose reflections, lose dynamic GI, lose hundreds of shadow casting lights, lose area light shadows and translucent shadows. It's a tradeoff, but you are choosing to focus on what makes HW-RT bad, instead of honestly mentioning what makes it good and bad, to somehow make it another doom and gloom story for HW-RT.

Unbelievable.

Who cares about sub pixel shadow accuracy with Nanite when you are losing this many visual features? RT shadows with Nanite works well enough, the Matrix demo used them on cut scenes as "hero lights". And they were very good looking.

The game developement of Silent Hill 2 began in 2019.

You are not making any sense, if it's UE5 then they couldn't have started on it till 2020, the first showing of UE5, the closest you are looking for is a late 2023 release date, which means delayed till 2024 like the rest of the industry. Literally every game released in the last two years has had major delays. You also casually waved away your mistake about Tekken 8. Even so, if they managed to get a release date without HW-RT, there is still a strong chance that they WILL add HW-RT later for PCs at least. I don't know why would even bring this up!

 

[chris1515]

Not inferior, I disagree, VSM cost a lot of performance too, especially with lots of shadow casting lights, RT shadows can support hundreds of lights, area light shadows and translucent shadows, that makes it superior or in -the worst case- on equal footing with VSM (in terms of tradeoffs).

VSM doesn't support area light shadows, and don't inherently do AO/Contact Hardening .. it's another hack. Yes RT shadows lack sub pixel accuracy compared to VSM with Nanite, but that's a very acceptable tradeoff.

Funny now you guys suddenly care about sub-pixel micro shadows, while ignoring scene wide changes that HW-RT bring in terms of GI accuracy, dyanmic GI on dynamic objects, more accurate, higher resolution reflections, off screen reflections, whole area light shadows, shadows from hundreds of lights, translucent shadows .. etc.

No more than using software Lumen causes you to lose reflections, lose dynamic GI, lose hundreds of shadow casting lights, lose area light shadows and translucent shadows. It's a tradeoff, but you are choosing to focus on what makes HW-RT bad, instead of honestly mentioning what makes it good and bad, to somehow make it another doom and gloom story for HW-RT.

Unbelievable.

Who cares about sub pixel shadow accuracy with Nanite when you are losing this many visual features? RT shadows with Nanite works well enough, the Matrix demo used them on cut scenes as "hero lights". And they were very good looking.


You are not making any sense, if it's UE5 then they couldn't have started on it till 2020, the first showing of UE5, the closest you are looking for is a late 2023 release date, which means delayed till 2024 like the rest of the industry. Literally every game released in the last two years has had major delays. You also casually waved away your mistake about Tekken 8. Even so, if they managed to get a release date without HW-RT, there is still a strong chance that they WILL add HW-RT later for PCs at least. I don't know why would even bring this up!

Because you think developers didn't have access to UE5 early on. You are not part of Bloober Team, they know better than you in which production stage they are. It seems they are on the polish phase from what the president of the studio told to investors.

Having accurate shadows is very important and this is not a limitation of UE5, this is a limitation of HW-RT and API which aren't good enough. And software Lumen doesn't mean losing dynamic GI. This is less precise with some light leaking but this is dynamic. They don't use lightmap.

In Matrix Awakens, ray traced shadow are used during cutscene on character and this is non nanite content.

And I am pretty sure Tekken 8 will release next year if it was very far from release, Sony would have wait to show a trailer during a State of play. After maybe the two games will release with HW-RT GI and reflections on PC and virtual shadow maps. Just wait and see.

 

[Lurkmass]

VSM doesn't support area light shadows, and don't inherently do AO/Contact Hardening .. it's another hack. Yes RT shadows lack sub pixel accuracy compared to VSM with Nanite, but that's a very acceptable tradeoff.

Which is why Epic Games extended virtual shadow mapping with shadow map ray tracing (tracing against shadow map so it doesn't use HW RT) to be able support contact hardening for soft shadows and they use distance fields in Unreal Engine to do ambient occlusion ...

Funny now you guys suddenly care about sub-pixel micro shadows, while ignoring scene wide changes that HW-RT bring in terms of GI accuracy, dyanmic GI on dynamic objects, more accurate, higher resolution reflections, off screen reflections, whole area light shadows, shadows from hundreds of lights, translucent shadows .. etc.

I don't think anybody here is dismissing the merits specific to HW RT ...

No more than using software Lumen causes you to lose reflections, lose dynamic GI, lose hundreds of shadow casting lights, lose area light shadows and translucent shadows. It's a tradeoff, but you are choosing to focus on what makes HW-RT bad, instead of honestly mentioning what makes it good and bad, to somehow make it another doom and gloom story for HW-RT.

Unbelievable.

Who cares about sub pixel shadow accuracy with Nanite when you are losing this many visual features? RT shadows with Nanite works well enough, the Matrix demo used them on cut scenes as "hero lights". And they were very good looking.

Less precise reflections and indirect diffuse lighting aren't big enough problems to not ship the product ...

Severely artifacting shadows like we see below and in this thread means that the product isn't going to ship ...



Objectionable issues that we see in this picture aren't going to be tolerated by asset artists. Epic Games does not share your opinion that RT shadows were a good enough solution for Nanite hence the need felt by their own engineers to both implement and optimize the virtual shadow mapping technique because of artifacts seen above ...

Having no shadows or very broken shadows was not going to be an acceptable outcome for Epic Games. Giving up the ability to trivially implement area light/shadows (which comes with RT shadows) so that they can have a compatible shadowing solution for Nanite with sub-pixel accurate hard shadows is exactly what Epic Games intended to happen in order for Nanite to remain a viable option in Unreal Engine ...

To Epic Games, liberating artists from the limitations on how geometrically dense their assets can be is a bigger improvement in iteration times over RT shadows. If others like Nvidia or Microsoft see things differently then maybe they should be the ones to go and make their own general purpose game engines to sell their case to developers ...

 

[DavidGraham]

Having accurate shadows is very important

Just like having accurate reflections and GI.

software Lumen doesn't mean losing dynamic GI

Dynamic GI is lost on "dynamic" objects with software Lumen. Only hardware can do tracing against skinned meshes. You also lose a metric ton of GI over distance, software only does 200m GI, hardware covers 1000m GI, so it's the best in an open world game.

this is not a limitation of UE5

VSMs require some ray tracing to do soft, contact hardened shadows, which increase their cost under these conditions, when using multiple lights, the cost is huge. They also have a huge performance penalty on foliage and grass, UE5 recommends VSM to be disabled on such conditions.

If you care about "accurate" shadows, then RT shadows are still the superior choice due to their superior softness and accurate contact hardening, VSM lose a lot of performance when trying to get close to the accuracy of RT shadows, and still don't get close enough.

Because you think developers didn't have access to UE5 early on. You are not part of Bloober Team, they know better than you in which production stage they are. It seems they are on the polish phase.

Again, you are still looking at a very late 2023 pushed back to 2024 release. I don't trust that any developer had access to UE5 before 2020 to be honest. The engine wasn't even available to developers until after that date.

 

[Inuhanyou]

What are you folks even arguing about at this point tbh

 

[cwjs]

Of course RT produces a more accurate result than vsms. you can do vsm on nanite meshes dude, you can only afford to do RT on proxies. Its not complicated why they use them.

 

[chris1515]

Of course RT produces a more accurate result than vsms. you can do vsm on nanite meshes dude, you can only afford to do RT on proxies. Its not complicated why they use them.

Exactly this is the reason this is not an option for Nanite shadows.

In this video around 3:10, he show why it is a problem and he talks about shadows. He uses the path tracer but this is the same with HW-RT and here we can see the shadow accuracy problem. And he said it at 3:34 this is the same thing with raytraced shadow.

This is the nanite mesh

And this is the Nanite fallback mesh, this is not a problem of shadow being precise to the pixel anymore. Shadow aren't looking like the same than the Nanite Mesh. This is not a pixel size error at all...

 

[DavidGraham]

Having no shadows or very broken shadows was not going to be an acceptable outcome for Epic Games.

Curiously, in NvRTX 5.0, there are improvements to solve some ray tracing issues, such as shadow mismatching when using Nanite.

Optimize Your Ray Tracing Graphics with the New NVIDIA RTX Branch of Unreal Engine 5 | NVIDIA Technical Blog

This feature-rich branch is fully compatible with Unreal Engine 5, and contains all of the latest developments from NVIDIA in the world of ray tracing.

developer.nvidia.com

The NvRTX branch also has a BVH tool to check for overlapped kitbashed geometry spots and clear it or exclude it entirely from the BVH structure (exclude it from ray tracing).