GART: Games and Applications using RayTracing

It will soon be a 3 horse race and looking forward Intel's vision of ray tracing which might be revealed shortly with the release of Hitman 3. Definitely should give detractors something else to chirp about.

 

Sure but who gets to cast judgement on boosters vs “people who are more enthusiastic about brand X than I think they should be” ?

DXR isn’t very opinionated so IHVs already have a lot of room to innovate. I expect Intel’s vision is the same as everyone else’s which is to make it easier and faster to cast rays at triangle based geometry. That basic setup isn’t likely to change for a long time.

 

I blame fanboys on the net too.
Even here we have posters that confuse DXR with RTX or simply call raytracing for RTX to make it seem like a NVIDIA only feature...because AMD's performance is lagging behind.

There is plenty of blame to go around on this one.

 

Oh wow it’s an actual game. The RT demo wasn’t very impressive. That transparent freeze effect is very cool though, wonder if it also reflects the environment. Can’t tell from the video.

 

The Medium performance tests.
Curiously, but all Amperes are faster than 2080 Ti here, wonder whether other sites will get the same results or whether these results are specific to the testing scene they used.

 

Everything else aside, do they really need to make every damn window a mirror to show "we got rays!1"? The bookshelf windows turns almost into frosted mirror with raytracing according to the comparison there

 

seems accurate in a low lighting situation. when it's dark, glass becomes a mirror. Mirrors are reductively just glass with 1 sided painted.

When it's bright glass should be fairly transparent.

 

There is an actual "damn window" in that same comparison and it isn't even changing between RT On and Off. Try harder.

 

Yes, it becomes more mirrorlike, but it doesn't turn into mirror unless you're in notably brighter environment than what's behind the window and even then it's not exactly mirror. And damn well it isn't a frosted mirror with such distortions in the reflection (lack of rays or artists choice?)

Yes, I exaggerated with the "every damn window", the point still stands with exaggerated mirrorlike surfaces most games use when they shouldn't. It's nothing new or exclusive to raytracing either, it's happened before when devs get "new toys".

I'm not sure what you mean by "try harder", other than trying to discredit other users by implying there's some specific agenda behind the post.

 

Ya the reflection is way too strong in that scene on the bookshelf.

 

Devs don't exaggerate somethings, they simply set roughness threshold and RT reflections work for every pixel that falls into this threshold.
Roughness maps are a part of PBR ever since physically based rendering has been adopted by game devs.
Undesirable objects can only be excluded via object ID mask or something like this on per artist's decision.
Certain RT reflections might look exaggerated to you because these reflection will simply be missing in the frame without RT due to the nature of screen space effects.
Other than this, even if there is a fallback cube map, it's considered to be a good tone for artist to decrease brightness of the cube map so that the reflection appear darker and less visible than it should be in reality.
This is done on purpose of course because cube maps reflections most often don't match with real environment and because of this darker objects with darker cube maps perceptually look better than glowing ones with bright cube maps (even if bright cube maps are technically more correct for a scene).
With RT, there can be pitfalls too since shading is usually greatly simplified for the RT reflections, sometimes this can cause reflections appear brighter than they should be in reality since simple shading in RT reflections is not equal to full blown shading in raster pass.

 

Yay, so we can now decrease roughness in textures to amplify unnaturally sharp (and faster) reflections, and then back us up on Disney Research and their approximate models, which we further simplify for games just a bit.
'It's all physically correct guys, it's your eyes which are wrong!' ...but just joking - no complaints against reflection porn from my side.

Thinking seriously, there might be also another problem: Maybe due to reflection, the perceptual error doubles, because we now see the error in shading of the surface, plus that same issue on the reflected surface.
It may appear too bright, too sharp, etc., although there's more to fix than just that.

 

Some games like cp2077 fixed the unnatural reflections. But depending on narrative it might be suitable to forget those cases and bring up unpatched images/claim reflections are always bad when ray traced. Sometimes it's a bug, sometimes it's poor artistic choice. Technology itself is fundamentally sound.

https://game8.co/games/Cyberpunk-2077/archives/314076#hm_3

 

Where did anyone criticize raytracing as a technology?

 

Same place where issues fixed don't get acknowledged.

 

I can confirm that [some] developers make windows more poppy, so show off reflections. Indeed the developer(s), not the artist(s). In general I would say all the parameters are free game, and besides PBR has so many unsatisfactory representations, it's understandable that people [sometimes] start random sampling parameter space.

 

They do the same on Spiderman Miles Morales. This is like lens flare, chromatic aberration (yikes). They oversuse it but it will be more reasonnable with time.

 

In the comparison you are discussing there's a glass door on the cabinet on the left and a street window ahead.
The latter doesn't even change when you enable RT.
The glass door has a rather awful cubemap on it which is changing to an accurate RT reflection of the same reflectivity.
The reflections on the glass frames on the wall to the left gets less reflective with RT even.
The problem doesn't exist.