Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2019]

Is it just me or this realtime implementation of ray tracing in Quake 2 lacks several features?

Indirect lighting seems almost missing, the older one with a lot of noise was much better.

 

It only supports one bounce and the filtering is very aggressive.

 

1060/RX580 running 1620p locked 60fps, no checkerboarding or upscaling like the X. Those outperforming the X, impressive coding by the devs optimizing it like that.

 

? No?

 

Yes.


RX580 @console (one x) settings performs like One X, at native resolution though. Thus outperforming it.

 

that explains many things...

UE games meant 30 fps for me. As @Nesh already pointed out, there were impressive 60 fps games on consoles like DMC, but UE games, almost ALWAYS 30 fps.

Art style was usually not very inspired or similar to Gears -which is ok for the setting, but there were disproportionate limbs and the typical look of sweaty marines everywhere-.

 

that also might explain many things, like UE games being very similar looking -usually- in the art style department. That Batman game, which was good, made with UE was an example. Nice game, but Batman looked to me like a Gears character with a mask.

Not to mention another flaws of the engine. UE games like Gears had some kind of temporal antialiasing that worked and then stopped to work in between frames, the engine couldn't have typical AA techniques.

Even Bethesda made better looking games than those running under UE. When I first saw Skyrim my jaw dropped on the floor.

Accustomed to many games running on UE, when I saw the perfect Antialiasing of Skyrim -I couldn't spot a single jaggie- compared to what I was used to seeing -again, thanks UE-, it was incredible. I was so happy to switch engines back then. When an article said that a game was running on UE I related it to crappy games, not happy at all.

Not so many people ever mentioned the clean look of Skyrim for a game of its time, used to the dirtiness of UE games.

 

thanks for sharing, I also posted the video elsewhere. One can only imagine what can be done with games like Quake 2 if you add Ray Tracing to the mix..

It's glorious, like John says, and I also agree with Alex Battaglia that I like the original Quake more than 2, but still.... The original Quake + Ray Tracing..... drools....

 

The good thing is that the quake engine was used in many games during that era, dues ex comes to mind. Wouldnt mind Unreal either

 

Deus Ex used Unreal engine.
Anachronox and Daikatana both used variants of the Quake engine (among Ion Storm games).

Quake 2 engine games: Heretic 2, SiN, Kingpin, Soldier of Fortune.
Probably some smaller games, too. I think one of the 007 titles on console and maybe a Blade game also used a version of the Quake 2 engine.

 

I'm back from my suspension! Anyway, I care about proper software engineering and I think Unity is a bad architecture for a game engine. And having a separate language and memory model for performant code is not a nice design.

Also, I feel Unity is a bit dishonest in their marketing/communication. They lure you in with the ease of starting a project, but if you get performance problems it is very difficult to fix those. Other engines might be more difficult to start working with, but they are probably much more predictable in terms of performance.

 

Any engine that targets complete beginners is going to be 'a bit dishonest'*. They can't convey the complexities from the get go without confusing and scaring their users. Unity is built for what it is, and is a necessary bunch of compromises to enable the games it enables. There are other 'pro' engines out there that we rarely ever talk about, which I for one have no idea how good they are in terms of complexity and performance. eg. Sony's PhyreEngine came up in another thread yesterday. That's a cross-platform engine never talked about. However, these days cross-platform includes mobile which offers its own set of challenges.

Conceptually, you can't have a jack of all trades that's mastered them all, which is what a Unity style engine needs to be. There's also a lot of legacy behind Unity but you can't start a clean-slate design engine without starting from grass roots, which is a huge undertaking and beyond the financial viability for most. Unity could produce a 'Unity 2' perhaps with a ground-up rewrite, or Epic with something other than the Unreal Engine (surely it's time for the Fortnite Engine?!). Realistically though, the range of options we have now is the natural product of commercial limitations and software evolution. It's the same principle behind English's truly shit spelling, but which cannot be replaced because the language is in use and we just have to learn to work with its limitations instead of inventing a clean, efficient English 2.

* Edit - My big bugbear with all tutes is they don't go on to explain best practices. In Unity's case, from the start you learn about creating and destroying gameobjects and trashing the GC. Very early on, GC should be explained with simple instruction how to manage resources. Maybe the new GC system will fix that though? Making it transparent in the engine rather than require the developers to manually handle it would be simpler.

 

German? :V

I keed.

 

Quite good video, needed reminder. There is even screenshot of B3D. Rich tells interentz to hold the horses, there will be fakes, lekas and dissapointmens, there are less apples to apples HW comparisons and in the end we should be pleased.

 

Was it the front page? *ahem*

edit:

Oh, 11m15s Random.

 

There is frontpage? Fake edit : I wonder how Kepler will fare nextgen

 

Point 7: Remember Price Target!

Point 8: Prepare for disappointments.

 

Depends on what you expect. Im expecting mid-range hardware for the time, if theres low/mid i think is very realistic.

 

Has this rumor that B3D has a front page ever been corroborated by a reputable source?

 

Rumor can be that beyond3d works tightly with Sony for their next toy.