IGN: after 1 year; Where art thou ray traced games

[iroboto]

Lots of strong opinions on this one, so let’s have respect for each other on various perspectives.

I know a while back (when RTX demos came out) some of us predicted we’d see a lot of weak bolt-ons, but some studios showed us more was possible.

everyone’s perspective will change given a long enough time scale, so let’s perhaps be specific; knowing what you know today where are our thoughts on the state of RT fidelity and adoption rates by end of 2022 for consoles? And separately for PC?

 

[davis.anthony]

I personally feel the only area we need ray tracing is reflections as there's no hacks that even get close to capturing all of the reflection data (Especially for off screen objects) where as I feel we have techniques in place that do a good enough job for lighting and shadows that won't start to break apart just yet.

For me:

RT reflections
Screen space shadows
Voxel based GI

 

[digitalwanderer]

I still have an RX 580 so I don't have an opinion yet, my son's 2060 super can't really game with RT on in any titles that support it without totally tanking his framerates so I can't use his rig to try it.

Is RT still the domain of the 3xxx series only? I'm pretty sure that AMD's 6xxx series sucks at it too.

Also, if there are games that use RT on the 3xxx, are they playable with RT on or is the FPS hit too high?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Kinda feel the console solutions just aren't strong enough to support a next-gen solution. Still hopeful hybrid solutions will leverage the RT hardware for indirect solutions. Off the top of my head, what if you used low detail proxies to trace lighting and map that to the detailed geometry?

 

[Malo]

Off the top of my head, what if you used low detail proxies to trace lighting and map that to the detailed geometry?

Aren't some RT reflections doing that already? Sampling at a lower detail and update rate?

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Looking at currently released games, especially those on consoles. Thus far I think the best implementation of RT is Metro Exodus EE. Uniform and correct global lighting is, IMO, the most important and universally used feature that RT brings to the table. Every game could use correct global lighting. Not ever game needs to shove RT reflections in your face everywhere you walk.

While reflections are nice, not all environments need it and I feel some current gen games that extensively leverage RT reflections are forcing reflections a little too heavily with reflective surfaces that don't necessarily need to exist but only exist to showcase that they have RT. Before someone get's all in a huff that I mean X game, this isn't targeted at any specific game as there are some games that use reflections exceedingly well in an environment where it actually makes sense that there would be a lot of reflective surfaces. Basically, I'm not looking forward to a sitauation where so many games are set in rainy, wet, perfectly clean glass windowed or perfectly clean perfectly reflective metal environments purely to show that they are using reflections.

That brings me to another pet peeve I've seen in games that is exacerbated by trying to push RT reflections. Perfectly flat floors. Something that is almost nonexistent in the real world outside of rooms and halls with marbled floors (pretty rare). It's rare to see a game get this right with uneven flooring and thus uneven light reflection off the flooring (Last Judgement 2 did this extremely well). The same goes for overly reflective vehicles in some games. In the real world outside of a showroom you're almost never going to see perfect reflections on a vehicles surface. So it's extremely jarring to see it in some games.

So yeah, IMO, reflections for the sake of reflections to show off RT is the lazy man's (developer's?) way out of using RT, IMO. Global RT illumination, while harder, is what really sells the tech for me. Again, this doesn't mean never use RT reflections, just that I'm significantly more impressed by correct global RT lighting. Reflections come across as more on the level of "Hey, look, I have RT. See RT. RT RT RT. Pretty RT." and who cares if the game actually needed that many reflections in the game or even if it's correct that all those reflective surfaces are so perfectly reflective (/gag).

Regards,
SB

 

[trinibwoy]

I’m happy with the uptake so far on PC. Developers are using RT a lot more than I expected and it’s only going to get better from here. It could be a lot worse. Like the non-existent adoption of mesh shaders.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

When the specs of the new consoles came out, it seemed the majority opinion (at least on forums with people knowledgeable about this stuff) was that if RT would be used, it would be used extremely sparingly. That's...basically what's happened? If anything implementations like Spider Man and Metro Exodus have exceeded my expectations already. He cites the pandemic and maybe immature API's which sure play a part, but simply because Sony/MS hyped ray tracing doesn't mean it was actually going to be viable in an impactful way for the majority of games. I mean as a videogame journalist, it's kind of your job to cut through the marketing hyperbole to inform your readers and set expectations accordingly.

There's always some new routes for optimization sure, but largely there's no mystery here - AMD was just late on this compared to Nvidia, and the RTX cards also have the addition of DLSS to help performance further. You're not seeing every game with extensive ray tracing on consoles because the hardware just isn't up to it.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Aren't some RT reflections doing that already? Sampling at a lower detail and update rate?

Yeah. But I'm thinking instead of tracing a basic model against basic models, you could have a bunch of cuboids representing bounding volume or something and trace against these to get the approximate light near that area. think voxel lighting where the 'voxels' are irregular cuboids coarsely representing the game geometry. Or prebaked lightmaps where the lightmaps aren't prebaked but being RTd in the background. Sadly RTRT is triangle based whereas ideally you'd want spherical sampling.

Also, just remembered Sony's patent on photomapping. Oh, what might have been!

 

[trinibwoy]

Is it more complicated than the generation only being 1 year old? How many “next gen” games do we usually get after a year?

 

[Seanspeed]

Is it more complicated than the generation only being 1 year old? How many “next gen” games do we usually get after a year?

This new generation has been very different from any other previous generation. MS basically did a first and had absolutely zero 1st party next gen games to show off its new, next gen machine(Flight Sim could be considered an exception). And then Sony has had some, which is normal, but making games like GT7 and Horizon Forbidden West and GoW Ragnorok all cross-gen is also a very new thing for them as well, when in previous generations they basically *never* did cross gen for 1st party games once their new hardware was out.

So yea, it's been especially scant on that front, as 1st party are typically the ones who make these true next gen titles that show off what can be done, since these platform owners dont strictly need 1st party games to be their big money makers on their own.

That said, I feel like quite a lot of multiplatform console games are using ray tracing - a lot more than I expected, honestly. So I just kind of disagree with the premise from the beginning. I even think the cross gen nature has probably made ray tracing *easier* in a way, since it's a clear way to utilize the overhead that new hardware has over the old console versions.

I think it could be a more difficult choice for true next gen titles, since the core ambitions will be higher and the cost of using ray tracing *will* come at the expense of being able to push in other aspects on a fundamental level. Obviously things like reconstruction can provide more overhead to make ray tracing easier to justify, but that overhead could similarly be used elsewhere just the same. I do expect ray tracing to be reasonably common still, but I'm not necessarily expecting it to be 'the standard' for any and all big games going forward, either. We'll see.

 

[iroboto]

Is it more complicated than the generation only being 1 year old? How many “next gen” games do we usually get after a year?

I’ll ask precisely this question again next year around this time but yes, I’m certain that and covid are factors for the output this year and next.

 

[Sonic]

I'm not holding my breath for games later this generation to utilize ray tracing in a way that will blow my socks off. Right now it seems the consoles just aren't performant enough. I do believe devs will get more familiar with the hardware and optimize their games to make the most of the RT hardware in the console APU's. What I would hope for is devs finding ways of using the RT hardware to overcome the raw performance figures. If that comes and what flavor that comes in I'll be happy surprised if it comes to fruition.

Could there be any potential advantages of having an APU and unified memory instead of separate CPU and GPU, and memory, when it comes to RT? How much of the RT stuff is done on the CPU side and would the APU setup allow a speed up of RT?

Will devs be able to to manipulate the hardware in ways that weren't originally intended and have some type of break through?

 

[lethal01]

Feels like we've been getting a steady stream and increase on PC as well as an impressive number of them on Console. I see only good things.

 

[snc]

Imo further in generation the less rt we see on both ps5 and xsx, same case with 120fps and native 4k, probably also we will see more 30fps titles, tough different story if mid refresh will be back again

 

[see colon]

I personally feel the only area we need ray tracing is reflections as there's no hacks that even get close to capturing all of the reflection data (Especially for off screen objects) where as I feel we have techniques in place that do a good enough job for lighting and shadows that won't start to break apart just yet.

For me:

RT reflections
Screen space shadows
Voxel based GI

I think reflections are the most noticeable for sure, personally I like AO and GI the best. There are ways of doing "perfect" reflections, they just happen to be expensive. But honestly, so are RT reflections. And as far as I know there aren't any games or benchmarks that use both RT and non-screen space reflections to know which is more expensive.

RT shadows might be my least favorite. They look good sometimes, but their implementations often have an almost unfiltered look, where I can see the pixels in the shadows.

 

[SumoSaki]

They say Astro's Playroom has raytracing, this is not correct.

 

[Goodtwin]

Previous gen consoles are supported for years after the new consoles release these days. Most games released thus far were largely developed for the PS4 and Xbox One. Just like the PS4 and Xbox One were held back early on because they were essentially getting ports of the 360/PS3 games. Perhaps its unlikely that we will see ray tracing become the dominate rendering solution, but being so early on I feel its unlikely that we have seen developers fully leverage the possibilities. Smart implementations will happen as developers learn how to smarty use it to get the best bang for their buck.

 

[davis.anthony]

I think reflections are the most noticeable for sure, personally I like AO and GI the best. There are ways of doing "perfect" reflections, they just happen to be expensive. But honestly, so are RT reflections. And as far as I know there aren't any games or benchmarks that use both RT and non-screen space reflections to know which is more expensive.

RT shadows might be my least favourite. They look good sometimes, but their implementations often have an almost unfiltered look, where I can see the pixels in the shadows.

With the new geometry pipeline being so flexible is could allow for some of the traditional expensive tricks to not be quite so expensive.

They could maybe use voxel based cone tracing for GI and reflections but use the RT hardware to maybe speed it up?

 

[London Geezer]

They say Astro's Playroom has raytracing, this is not correct.

Yeah the level of knowledge at IGN is abysmal.

The whole premise of the video is just not great either. Yes RT was publicised (like many other things) but literally nobody was expecting every game to feature it, especially in the first year. Quite the opposite in fact. Just like not all games have zero loading times, or super duper haptics, or any of the many things manufacturers use in their marketing to sell their products.

And yet we have already seen quite a few notable examples. It’s not like you can just push a button and BANG! RT is implemented. Sorry, IGN.