4k is already a waste of processing power IMO. Suppose 8k ends up being more of a thing. In that case, Microsoft, Sony, and AMD should focus more on providing good enough image reconstruction to that resolution and providing a true next-generation leap the next time out with more games able to replace rasterized lighting with Raytraced/Path Traced lighting and good 60 to 120 FPS performance.
Do you think there will be a mid gen refresh console from Sony and Microsoft?
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Trying to argue that Battlefield V is a 'next gen' game just cuz it has some weak RT reflections, despite otherwise looking EXACTLY the same in every other respect as the last gen game it absolutely is - is just completely, and totally wild. I feel like I'm beyond the pale here.
Y'all are ripping and twisting 'next gen' to mean something completely different that it's absolutely never meant before. Next gen has always meant a truly significant overall uplift in the technical aspects of new games. Not just some enhancement to a single graphics feature, and especially not one that really needs a back to back comparison to really demonstrate the difference.
Maybe it's just cuz this forum is so Nvidia and PC-biased that y'all are going to the ends of the earth(argument-wise) to redefine the term 'next gen' because you dont want to acknowledge how utterly definitive consoles are in terms of how games(especially AAA games) get made. I really cant think of any other rationale for the whacky arguments I'm having to actually deal with here. They aren't remotely based in any kind of actual reality.
I mean, I really could go on and on about some of the examples you gave, but I dont want to waste too much more of my time than I already am. Just one more though - Minecraft RTX. Path traced Minecraft looks great no doubt, but it mainly feels like such a giant leap cuz the base Minecraft lighting is so incredibly primitive. There have been tons of non-RT based lighting upgrades for Minecraft that make the RTX solution much, much less seemingly 'revolutionary' by comparison. All while doing so for far more reasonable processing costs. Either way, even Minecraft RTX still very obviously doesn't come close to the overall fidelity of most modern games, let alone some of the best looking ones. Y'all are very clearly placing near infinite level of importance on like one or two specific graphics features and trying to argue they alone are the only things that define fidelity and generations and that's just f'ing weird.
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DavidGraham
Veteran
Path Tracing is the end of all tech, shadows, lighting, relfections are all upgraded in a single swing. That is the definition of next gen. What you are talking about is the aesthetics of the game, the art direction .. this has nothing to do with the tech powering it.
Path Tracing doesn't affect polyogn count and the physics of the game of course, but we've had advanced physics on PC ages ago, if anything it has been nothing but regression on that front thanks to consoles.
What you are really left with for your next gen definition is the polygon count, which I agree with you is only pushed when consoles say so nowadays. What I don't agree with however is equating polygon count with the massively upgraded shadows, dynamic GI, reflections in path traced/heavy ray traced games. If you do that, then you are the one attributing next gen to one single factor.
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Inuhanyou
Veteran
What a disappointing video. I thought he had evidence contesting claims. But just talking about stuff everyone already knows.
Personal opinion and all here. I hope there's a PS5 Pro (and similar for Xbox) because these consoles aren't anywhere nearly well enough equipped to handle 4k displays without a drastic loss in image quality.
It's obviously a nightmare from a marketing perspective but it's simply the truth. I decided early on to stick with my old 1080p plasma and it's very much paid off for me. These consoles simply can't handle 4k and it's enormously visible.
It's obviously a nightmare from a marketing perspective but it's simply the truth. I decided early on to stick with my old 1080p plasma and it's very much paid off for me. These consoles simply can't handle 4k and it's enormously visible.
GhostofWar
Regular
Baked lighting really put a damper on world interactivity/physics for the last decade that's for sure, although AC unity still looks impressive because of it. The Finals finally is taking us back to where I expected us to be heading back with bfbc2 and bf3 and it's probably fair to say it's because they can use raytraced GI so they can still look good and not sacrifice visuals for the destruction. Hopefully their other coop game uses RTX GI aswell and keeps pushing world interactivity.
Please don't use such sweeping generalisations. There's a varied population here, some of whom may well agree with you. Argue with the people you are talking with, not the everyone else.
This is another point. PS5 and XBSX do not have the raw performance for higher resolution, 60 FPS and "next gen" graphics. Just compare the transition from the PS3 -> PS4 and PS4 -> PS5:
PS3 -> PS4: 9,7x more pixel (compute) performance and 8,6x GPU bandwidth
PS4 -> PS5: 5,4x more compute performance and 2,55x GPU bandwidth
Dead Space Remake doesnt even run in native 1080p with 60 FPS on a PS5...
We're talking technically about the most singular important feature. We can't see without light, and we can't see detail without shadows, or everything looks flat.
Light transport is technically the most important part of graphics left remaining. Our games are still very much designed around static light transport, and while that has massive processing advantages, it also takes away from a lot of beauty that games could have. Things that break static lighting: destruction, on-going particle effects, a player being able to dynamically light a hallway.
Just about every single game I've seen in level design is never dark, there are candles and torches pre-lit in the darkest depths of every secret dungeon. There are pre-lit candles in every tunnel. None of it really makes any sense, and none of it is dramatic to explore, because quite frankly, there is nothing to explore there, you can see everything. That's very different from walking around and lighting things yourself.
Then we get into reflections, and specular roughness. The list really goes on.
The reason Minecraft RTX looks so great, is because it's dynamic. Not because it's coming from a place that is so primitive. It's because you are literally building the blocks in that world and the light is wrapping around the mechanisms appropriately. You can create light based puzzles in Minecraft, and this is something you can't do in static lighting.
It's a lot more than just 1 feature. It's really is the last bastion for GPUs to conquer. You can undoubtedly increase triangle and texture detail straight up, but you're forever stuck in a world that has static/curated content. As we move forward in a future where our younger generation is looking toward user created content games, you need RT if you want graphics to support that game design philosophy.
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DavidGraham
Veteran
Yeah, forgot about The Finals, it's truly impressive what RTGI does in this game, you get to see true light dynamism in combination with a healthy amount of destruction. While Fortnight and Minecraft RTX offer something similar, their destruction is not on par, Fortnite has very minimal debris and destruction blocks, so light dynamism is not truly tested there, and Minecraft RTX lacks a destruction model entirely, stuff just disappear.
Teardown offers the best in that regard, but it's just simple voxels, with voxel path tracing, The Finals offers the polygon alternative.
Not just Minecraft, I recently played Serious Sam The First Encounter with the Path Tracing mod, it's truly an amazing feat to play it and experience the dark tunnels and rooms with my flashlight/gun muzzleflash, with the all the accompanying path tracing light/shadow/reflection dynamism. So far, Quake 1, Doom 1, and Half Life 1 all received path tracing mods, elevating their experience as well.
davis.anthony
Veteran
We've not had that since PS2 to PS3.
He warned you, tho
A hypothetical game with unlimited paths and bounces per pixel would indeed look better in almost every aspect save for asset resolution (polys and textures). But in current real time aplications, RT effects are done at such low sample counts, that the end result is so blurry that their superiority to a well made image/rasterization based aproximations is often questionable.
The age of tradeoffs isnt over.
The age of tradeoffs isnt over.
Again, if you can do about a few dozen rays per pixel per lightsource, then yes those shadows will be unquestionably superior to anything else.
Currently though, we can afford to do about 2 or so shadow rays per pixel, which cover multiple light sources and their area stochastically and temporally, and have to be heavily filtered to make up the difference.
The end results of that are not always obviously superior to proper next gen aproximations like the Virtual Shadow Maps of UE5.
The orange bars are standard AAA game development time, that honestly needs to drop down to 3 years or less but...
Red bars is if they went over the 4 year mark.
Judging by this graph, I think people need to get their expectations in check about RT.
Yes, it's true that RT is weaker on consoles, but we are a far way of understanding what the consoles are actually capable of in terms of RT.
Many games are designed today not from the ground up with RT, and we've only seen 1 AAA title released in that sense, even then, it's still a remake of existing game. I wouldn't call it a full ground up, but it fully requires RT hardware to play.
Games releasing this year were still only being 2019+ or 2020+ shortly after the release.
How long will it be for last gen to truly die off - 2024, games that started development in 2021+
How long will it be for pure RT games to arrive, 2024+
If Gen 1 of games is 2017 - 2023 - basically games that all started development before the next gen consoles were released, then, effectively the 2nd generation of games that started development following
would be 2021 - 2024
3rd generation would be 2023+ started development which lands around 2026 at the earliest, thus, mature RT titles.
edit: aw fack, the orange bars are for 3 years and red bars are for 4 years. Damn, it should have been 4 years and 5 years. Even worse!
Red bars is if they went over the 4 year mark.
Judging by this graph, I think people need to get their expectations in check about RT.
Yes, it's true that RT is weaker on consoles, but we are a far way of understanding what the consoles are actually capable of in terms of RT.
Many games are designed today not from the ground up with RT, and we've only seen 1 AAA title released in that sense, even then, it's still a remake of existing game. I wouldn't call it a full ground up, but it fully requires RT hardware to play.
Games releasing this year were still only being 2019+ or 2020+ shortly after the release.
How long will it be for last gen to truly die off - 2024, games that started development in 2021+
How long will it be for pure RT games to arrive, 2024+
If Gen 1 of games is 2017 - 2023 - basically games that all started development before the next gen consoles were released, then, effectively the 2nd generation of games that started development following
would be 2021 - 2024
3rd generation would be 2023+ started development which lands around 2026 at the earliest, thus, mature RT titles.
edit: aw fack, the orange bars are for 3 years and red bars are for 4 years. Damn, it should have been 4 years and 5 years. Even worse!
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Here is a comparision in Hello Neighbor 2 between standard shadows and RT shadows: https://imgsli.com/MTYzNDM2
The Witcher 3 Next Gen has shadows for the alpha test vegetation which gets accelerated by Lovelace's OMM.
davis.anthony
Veteran
After seeing the SS Shadows in Days Gone a few other recent games I would be more than happy to see that over RT shadows and to then use the spare rays to improve other areas.
Thats a comparison between a game running fin in both instances, in which one has ultra shadow settings, and the other not, and nothing else is different. Easy choice there.
In the world od next-gen console games, the choices devs will have to make is between excellent RT shadows at the expense of compute/bandwith that renders everything else merely serviceable, VS. excellent everything else and serviceable shadows.
I don't mean this literally of course, its a intended as a illustrative though experiment, my point is only that merely using RT does not make graphics "perfect".
CGI useses 1.000x more rays than we currently can do in real time to achieve proper path tracing. Devs will still be picking their poison. Its not a choice between old horrible raster effects or perfect path tracing. They'll be chosing over next gen imperfect raster effects, or barely working imperfect hybrid RT. The cost/benefit sweet-spot will be a mix of both where each is most usefull, and these trade-offs will be a major focus of research and refinement throughour the whole gen.
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That‘s probably true although it will be difficult to squeeze a lot of rays out of the new consoles. It’s not fair to judge until we’ve seen what Insomniac, Guerilla etc can do with the hardware but even traditional rendering seems to be pushing the limit. Some of the prettiest games so far (Demon’s Souls, HFW, Plague Tale) are already running at 30fps to get there.
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