Impact of nVidia Turing RayTracing enhanced GPUs on next-gen consoles *spawn

... AA?

 

Are there any games that use the stencil method? It seams like it shouldn't have much of a performance penalty or be less flexible compared to render to texture, and but would avoid any artifacts caused by it.

immediate edit - is this how portals in Portal and Prey are done? Obviously they aren't reflections, but the technique would be essentially the same.

 

I'm not sure which games use stencil buffer method for reflections.
It's less flexible as you cannot render in low resolution or use bumpmapping with it. (At least easily.)

This should cover the method used.
https://th0mas.nl/2013/05/19/rendering-recursive-portals-with-opengl/

 

This basically sums up why RTX is not a viable option in modern games yet and why next gen consoles should not adopt it either.

And we're only talking about one feature of Raytracing in this video, a full blown real time RT pipeline comprising of shadow, reflection, GI and AO are simply not possible for another decade or two.

 

It's amazing how the same exact fact can be definitive proof for both adoption and rejection.

 

People shouldn't separate shadow, GI and AO in a raytraced pipeline. True raytracing from surface to light source includes AO (actually an approximation of GI using a large area light) and shadows. What RT can bring to lighting in general is yet to be tested. It's open to more shortcuts than reflections so may work at good framerates.

 

What I find the most puzzling, is that no one is actually talking about the most obvious thing: it really does not look all that amazing even with RTX enabled! It's still the same old basic BF game, with some reflective surfaces more reflective and less broken (but still broken!), and it still looks basic 'AF'. WHAT IS THE POINT.

 

That's because everything except the reflections is the same. Once the lighting gets upgraded, it should look notably better and next-gen. Adding reflections is just an easy add.

You then have a whole other question though whether devs are going to bother creating RT lighting solutions given the market size for such a thing, factoring in not only the expense of the cards but potential impact on framerates and if PC players would rather have better lighting or higher framerates. RT in a console would give a much larger market to drive development of alternative lighting engines.

 

SSRs are looking terrible in games. If SSRs are still there in the next generation it is gonna get ugly. All the artifacts in SSR are immersion disturbing. The viewport limitations are also there at all the time. Raytracing looks particularly good in Battlefield when a V1 explodes Rotterdam. Then all windows reflect the explosion. This contributes incredibly to a much better overall impression.

Battlefront II has many screnarios where raytracing reflections would fit as well.

Spoiler

 

But that's my point. Just reflections tank performance. Add shadows and GI, you have no game. It's just not going to work any time soon.

 

I think it could really benefit some single player experiences with slower pacing, where possibly combined with DLSS could provide some higher resolution performance.

 

That's why consoles should adopt raytracing. Compute was also a niche thing until consoles started using it.

It's an add-on right now. A game designed with RT in mind would target settings that allow 4K 60fps with ray tracing enabled. "Ultra" is whatever the developers tell gamers it is after all.

 

Dedicated Halo Forge baking accelerator.

 

when I watch the video I really don't think that it looks that amazing, but once the effect is disabled I think it looks wrong and I miss the effect, I think it enhances the visuals quite a bit...

but... first gen hardware and early days for software, it can only get a lot better, it's fairly impressive

 

Poassibly, but lost the reflections and have just proper lighting, it should make everything more 'next gen'.

True if what we want is the best thing to drive RT progress. Debatable if what we want is the best console in terms of cost, efficiency, and performance for a 5+ year gaming product.

You state that as fact, but it's speculation. A game designed for raytracing in mind might not be able to hit 4K60 no matter what you do because the minimum possible demands of RT may be too much for the hardware that can be put in a console.There are still plenty of unknowns. The only step forward in our understanding so far is that we see the first gen hardware is not powerful enough to offer everything in these first attempts. We need to see more attempts to see how far this first-gen tech can be stretched.

 

Until devs go through multiple software iterations with RTX features, I'm not willing to write it off. That review says that Battlefield V with ray tracing is "RT-core limited." How do they know that? They say power consumption is lower with RT on, which means CUDA cores are underutilized. Sure, but how do you know it's not an issue with cache-friendliness of the RT shading on the CUDA cores, or something else? We have no idea how it's implemented, or what optimizations might be available, what the limitations are with the API or the profiling tools. Maybe glossly reflections are a performance loss and high-quality soft shadows are a performance win? Consoles last five to eight years, and the difference in quality between launch games and late-gen games is vast, and that's with evolutionary raster engines. Why is the first software release of a first hardware release a line in the sand that can't be passed? I'm not expecting Dice to suddenly release an update that gives a 100% performance gain, but in the world of software development for games, the first try is never the best try.

 

I agree with you, but for argument's sake, the reason to think this is a 'line in the sand' is because ray tracing is a very straightforward solution that has existed for decades, and the only solutions to speed it up, which has been a huge priority for the professional industries, is more power and denoising. If there were tricks that could double the throughput of raytracing on a CPU by reusing ray data, it'd already be in use in every raytracer out there. Of course, depending how the code needs to be implemented there could be bottlenecks in this version, and there might be aspects in a hybrid renderer that can share workloads between rasterising and tracing that'll improve overall performance.

I guess another aspect is backlash. We've been hearing about raytracing improving everything, but this first example is only adding reflections and performance absolutely nose-dives. If BFV looked next-gen with the low framerate, it'd be a different story, or if it had reflections at only a mild impact. The initial impression after the beauty of things like the Pica Pica demo hasn't carried over, while of course there's the astronomical price-tag. So, yeah, I can understand a somewhat reactionary "is this it?" response after all the build up giving additional emphasis to this first title.

 

People are acting like consoles demand 100fps, consoles are content with 30fps. In 2020, we can get a good enough GPU that does ray tracing just fine @1440p30.

 

lol trust me when I say it was harder to explain the differences with 4K and HDR when no one had a 4K screen or HDR.
*it looks the same on my phone!*
sigh.
At least you can actually see the difference, you just need to know where to look. At a glance you won't notice, but over time you will notice. Until then, this is the best we can get while we wait for a more efficient rasterization technique.