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

Why did they do this video as "journalists" if they don't even prepare themselves. There is so much misinformation in that video...
Not even the games they counted are correct (just as a simple example Medium is available on PS5 & xbox with RT).

So far, the list of RT games is not really impressive for sure. But at least there are some examples. I don't really see the benefits of using RT on this gen of consoles. You loose a whole lot of processing power even for small effects that is much better suited for other stuff (in most cases). Yes, e.g. better light in scenes is a good thing, but fake lighting, shadows does most time also look good enough to be convincing.

 

It's IGN. If game journalism was Lego, they'd be Duplo.

 

You mean ray tracing against implicit surfaces or signed distance fields ? We're definitely starting to see more games computing the occlusion of primitives with analytic intersections. Some games already do effectively have RTAO this way ...

 

Yeah, but that's not using the RTRT hardware, which can't help with these workloads because it's fixed triangle based, right? SDFAO made an appearance before RTX hardware IIRC.

 

RT lighting, GI, shadows, AO and the like it's not as demanding as reflections and also has a big impact on development workflow for artists etc

If can target DX12U only hardware then can drop some of the faking altogether.

 

I wonder how many games are using the RT hardware for things other than recognisable graphics functions. Better audio, better line-of-sight for NPCs/enemies etc.

 

Did gears have RT sound?

It definitely has uses outside the obvious graphics stuff.

 

Returnal uses RT audio iirc.

 

Yea think they used it for RT GI?
Audio is project acoustics. For some reason thought that could be RT enabled.

 

FH5 uses Ray Tracing to enhance the game sound design.

 

Yea, I was getting it wrong as @BRiT said its FH5 that I was thinking of.

Does it use hardware RT? Is it the same audio on XO?

 

Software RT for audio - on CPU afaik

 

I think it'll go like Cerny predicted for the PS5, and the Series consoles use the same GPU architecture so it shouldn't change all that much:




Games with higher polycount and texture size will tend to have less resources for RT, whereas games with simpler geometry and texture (i.e. RT Minecraft on Series X should happen eventually?) can afford the compute resources for more ray tracing effects.
IIRC "Global Illumination" in that slide means illumination/brightness only, and not shadows or ambient occlusion, whereas GI is usually meant as a term that does all three?
We'll probably see RT reflections in carefully selected cases where SSR really doesn't do it (hybrid reflections?), which is what we saw with Ratchet & Clank AFAIK.


I think the overlap between "games that look more photorrealistic" and "games that trace more rays" will be the same as we have right now, which is practically none. The most photorrealistic game will probably be an UE5 game using Nanite and Lumens (perhaps Gears 6?).
Unless someone is on the verge of releasing a massive development in the software optimization side for RT performance on RDNA2 consoles, this is where things will be until the end of 2022 and probably 2023.

This could change if the mid-gen consoles bring an updated architecture with significantly higher compute performance and raytracing acceleration. That could indeed be where the mid-9h-gens are going, as targeting a higher resolution and/or framerate seems a bit moot when PS5/XSX already to 1440p+upscaling and 60FPS.

- Performance-killing RT that is only usable with DLSS on >$1000 (current street price) graphics cards on as many games Nvidia can send their engineering power towards.
Nvidia will continue to use their RTX implementations to push for an increase in their consumer GPUs' ASP, by making it increasingly harder to enable on their lower-end / older cards. With Turing they had that distinction on the hardware level by taking the RT units out of TU116, but with Ampere the GA107 just doesn't have the compute performance for RTX games.

- Console-like RT for everything else that bothers with RT at all (Resident Evil Village, Doom Eternal, etc.).


Regardless, even on the PC the market will still be severely lopsided towards the overwhelming majority of gamers owning GPUs that don't have as much RT acceleration as Nvidia's $800+ Amperes, mostly because there's an ongoing GPU price crisis that isn't going away anytime soon.
That means we will definitely not be getting rid of those dirty rasterization tricks or shadowmaps anytime soon.

I believe Astro's Playroom does have raytracing in a couple of places.
That PS3 is reflecting off-screen objects (at the 19m00 timestamp):

Case in point: I started playing Watchdogs Legion with RT turned on but I had to turn it off because the amount of reflections everywhere was just silly and screwed with immersion.

 

RT hardware acceleration doesn't necessarily have to be exclusive to triangle geometry. RT acceleration implementations can potentially support procedural geometry such as voxels, SDFs, or other primitives. Acceleration for geometric representations like SDFs or capsules usually isn't a big deal because there exists analytic methods to calculate their ray intersections quickly as opposed to triangle geometry. These specific geometric representations have inherent performance advantages due to the fact that we can model their shapes using polynomial functions. Graphics programmers using other geometric representations rely on the idea that there are certain sets of polynomial equations that have closed form (analytic) solutions to make their ray tracers run very fast ...

 

For PC we are approaching the 60 games mark, which is a considerable number. PC games tend to use RT even when their console versions don't ship with it, examples include Dirt 5, Godfall, Crysis trilogy, Far Cry 6, Battlefield 2042, Marvel's Guardian Of The Galaxy, and many others. These examples are a mix of AMD and NVIDIA sponsored titles, so hardware vendor association doesn't seem to be a factor into this. Games that have RT across PC and consoles often have a VASTLY superior RT implementation on PC. So it seems PC will always get a much superior implementation irrespective of consoles capabilities. Meaning consoles are not hindering RT adoption/progress on PC.

 

The shadow under the blue robot and the ladder look weird.