GART: Games and Applications using RayTracing

There is an enormous disconnect between the visual quality achieved here and the marketing by the talking heads.

 

Wow..
The amount of incorrect information on that one is quite amazing.

Toy Story & Jurassic Park didn't use any raytracing. (REYES even though almost having a RAY in name is still rasterizer.)
Also they didn't describe what they trace in their movie.. They say it's realtime render so I wager that none. (Or small amount.)

 

There is some mention of REYES being combined with small amounts of ray tracing in this Pixar source document, but the examples they mention differ ('A Bugs Life', 'Cars', 'City of Lost Children', 'Speed Racer', 'Poseidon').

paper.pdf (pixar.com)

But yeah, there does seem to be a disconnect though the people involved in production seem to have tons of experience. It is possible ray tracing was added late in the game (past month) since no mention was made in the November 2020 video link below.

Gods of Mars: a sci-fi epic made with Unreal and Virtual Production by Jose Antunes - ProVideo Coalition

 

The first Pixar movie with some hybrid REYES/ Raytracing is Cars and only for specular reflection on cars,some shadows and ambient occlution

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

If God of Mars was a game, it would look great after offline rendering look better.

 

Yup, before Cars Renderman didn't really have any concept of tracing rays.
Pretty sure the tracer in those couple of shots of Bugs Life was written within the surface shader or something..

Poseidon used Mental Rays as it had shots as sinking ship with lights on within a water was most likely not the best use case for Renderman at the time. (And few other movies.)

 

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2021/01/15/stalker-2-dev-update-gameplay-teaser-new-hero/

Not sure if this was mentioned previously.

 

Oh for crying out loud, even Microsoft, whose API DXR is, is now calling raytracing RTX?
edit: even if that's straight from Stalker devs instead of MS, it's still facepalm worthy

 

It's an article by GSC posted on the Xbox site and the site editors and managers wouldn't know any different. It's the fault of GSC really and very tacky. The Nvidia echo chamber here love it though.

 

So far "Nvidia echo chamber" seemingly don't care while the most objective and totally brand neutral guys seem to be really bothered by this...

 

it would have been correct if they said
RTX support, Series X and Series S.
But then AMD cards do not have RTX (if RTX was intentional)
My preference would be to say DXR support since that makes sense. Hopefully that is a typo and not the former.

 

It's a typo, they obviously meant to say just "RT" as there are no other RTX features on Xbox.

 

Worth pointing out, that the content is from Public Test Realm aka beta-version of the patch adding RT support, not retail patch.
Here's his newer video on the same subject

 

Marketing is a hell of a thing. I don’t think I’ve seen DXR mentioned in any promo materials even from AMD. So the masses are only seeing “raytracing” and “RTX”.

Naming both their cards and related software “RTX” was a genius move. It’s everywhere.

It baffles me why some people think unconditional disdain for Nvidia is an objective and neutral position. It seems exhausting.

 

If you're referring to my stance, I don't have disdain or hated or close to that for Nvidia. I think their products are fantastic, both hardware and software. They're miles ahead of AMD in both departments, especially software ecosystem across all platforms of general computing. Their introduction of Ray tracing in particular is one of the biggest impacts to gaming for a long time and I'm really looking forward to picking up an ampere this year.

All 4 off my gaming PCs in my house have Nvidia GPUs and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. My TVs are run by Nvidia Shields which are IMO the best devices I've ever used for HTPC.

DLSS 2 in particular is IMO one of the other best technologies to come to gaming, it opens up a lot of other possibilities and despite its minor flaws is incredible tech.

I have some disdain for Nvidia's marketing bullshit but I have that for a lot of companies marketing and PR crap. That's just part of living in a capitalist market competition.

I'm neutral in that I see what tech companies can provide me and choose not to actively promote them in any way outside of comments like above. It's the constant promotion for sake of boosting Nvidia's image and the relentless railing against their competitors that get me.

 

That is what happens when you have 2 years with featuresets uncontested in the marketplace. Ray tracing is associated with RTX now. Its not that Nvidia even did a spectacular job for the first year and a half... they were simply the only option.

 

To be fair, it’s a new paradigm for all vendors. Traditional raster graphics have been here for 2 decades now and RT acceleration having its first mainstream dive starting with this generation of consoles. I’m not sure what we were expecting, I guess it’s true it’s hard to spot the difference between baked lighting and RT lighting but games have purposefully limited lighting design for games because of this.

The move to RT should be challenging for all vendors and opens opportunities for new competitors to join the space now (in theory)

I look forward to the next 2 decades

 

No, not directed at you specifically.

They’ve done some shady shit over the years but their RTX marketing hasn’t been particularly malicious. It’s just that they were first out the gate and were the only game in town for a while. AMD did the same with SAM marketing of RBAR although that’s not at the same level of RT hype.

Yeah it’s annoying but par for the course in a 2 horse race. There’ll always be dedicated fans on both sides. I think part of it though is that Nvidia simply puts more stuff out there for boosters to boost.

 

It's not malicious at all, it's branding for their implementation of technologies. I just find it disgusting when people are so smothered with branding that they regurgitate it without thought. It shows how susceptible they are to manipulation and how little they actually have their own minds, just consume whatever they're fed. The latest GSC article on Xbox is a classic example. Having been part of B3D since 1998, I've never seen B3D as a place where that kind of branding nonsense has been pushed so hard as it has been here in the last 2 years.

That's my point, I don't want boosters here.