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

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I definitely think the discussion needs to be put on hold until we see some real-time lighting performance. If GI can be 'solved' effectively (quality, res and framerates) with RT hardware, I think it's valuable. One of the other considerations, using RT for non-graphics work, seems implausible now though for performance reasons. RT will be fully utilised just producing the visuals without spare runtime for tracing other elements, which can be left to the CPU (pending some paradigm shift in how game world's are represented and visualised, maybe wherein tracing can be used for world building that includes AI and sound traces as part of the model within the ray casting results, if such a thing is even possible).
Regarding RT lighting/shadows, I hope Shadow of the Tomb Raider gets its RTX patch soon. Also, we'll have Metro February next year. Control and Atomic Heart's release dates are yet TBA.
 
Wasnt one of those titles going to have GI rt? Anyway already impressed by the tech, waiting for a used RTX or new series so i can have it myself at home, tech probally beyond next gen.

Such a big diff with RT in bfv, too expensive new but used not so.
 
Wasnt one of those titles going to have GI rt? Anyway already impressed by the tech, waiting for a used RTX or new series so i can have it myself at home, tech probally beyond next gen.

Such a big diff with RT in bfv, too expensive new but used not so.
Metro Exodus.
 
I definitely think the discussion needs to be put on hold until we see some real-time lighting performance.


The comment section sees the majority preferring FPS, some even 120 or more over graphics features, i assume that must be pc gamers as consoles lack, well, both RT and crazy amounts of fps.
 
I definitely think the discussion needs to be put on hold until we see some real-time lighting performance
This thread will have quite a few flare ups with each DXR title release. Eventually it will calm down, but will see DLSS flare ups and RT flare ups.

All in all, it’s a big change from what we’re used to. And so understandably we will see some viewing this topic more conservatively than others.

But we’ve seen this cycle before. It’s always like this when not all the information is present. But once there is consistency/more data points in the performance the flare ups die off and everyone takes it as the norm. Citing PS4 vs XBO and 4Pro vs X1X. Once it’s accepted it’s accepted. I expect the same should happen with RT. And on the PC for this to happen again when AMD presents its solution.
 

The comment section sees the majority preferring FPS, some even 120 or more over graphics features, i assume that must be pc gamers as consoles lack, well, both RT and crazy amounts of fps.
Looking forward to DF to sell it to everyone. Haha

Honestly though DXR or not. They do a better job selling games to me than most trailers from the official company. I almost bought Shadow of War!
 

The comment section sees the majority preferring FPS, some even 120 or more over graphics features, i assume that must be pc gamers as consoles lack, well, both RT and crazy amounts of fps.

This is the problem with the current first gen RTX cards. PC gamers who spend what it costs to get a RTX card want or are used to 100+ frames and at least 2k resolution. I've been told so many times by my "PC elitists" buddies or read on forums how 60 FPS is trash compared to 144fps.
 
This is the problem with the current first gen RTX cards. PC gamers who spend what it costs to get a RTX card want or are used to 100+ frames and at least 2k resolution. I've been told so many times by my "PC elitists" buddies or read on forums how 60 FPS is trash compared to 144fps.
I guess that once DLSS is broadly implemented, the thirst for a higher resolution will be quenched (partially, at least).
 
This is the problem with the current first gen RTX cards. PC gamers who spend what it costs to get a RTX card want or are used to 100+ frames and at least 2k resolution. I've been told so many times by my "PC elitists" buddies or read on forums how 60 FPS is trash compared to 144fps.

Exactly, i can live with 60 or even 30 in trade for those graphics. It atleast highlights the FPS thing amongst many pc gamers.
With RTX series one can choose.
 
The problem I have with that is the RT results don't look significantly better. Mostly when switching between RTX on and off, the results look different, but not obviously better. If the framerate plummets to get 'more accurate even if you can't really notice it much' then it's not an obvious win for RT. What I need to see from raytracing, if framerate and res are going to be limited, is looking a generation ahead, as raytraced graphics are capable of. Either that or producing marginally better/different results but at greater ease and realism (dynamic lighting, less artefacts). At the moment we're in the space of 'still looks like current gen games' rather than 'approaching photorealism'; the needle for improvement is only shifting slightly.
 
People are looking at DXR for physics, audio. There's work in AA. Remedy's Control should be an interesting project.

I think there could also be large value in RT for indie type games that are maybe smaller, with simpler geometry. Think of a game like Inside, but with really high quality shadows, GI and physically accurate materials. I don't think you necessarily need to look at a top-end 60fps racing game or a top-end 3rd-person adventure game to find the utility of real-time ray-tracing.

Ultimately I just want it in consoles for the industry's sake, because if it doesn't happen that'll be 2020 + 6 years before it does. That's not good for any of us that want to see graphics progress. Ray-tracing is ultimately a visibility model that can test the entire game world, instead of just the limited culled world of the raster-space. There's no bridge between the two. At some point, to make a large leap in visual quality, RT is going to have to happen, especially on console. 8 years is a long time to wait.

That said, I'd probably turn it off to play my games at 60fps, lol ;) I want all of you to suffer through it from 2020-2026, at your shitty 30fps, so I can reap the benefits later.

As for ray-tracing just looking different, and not better, I think this vid does a better job of showing the improvements than what Nvidia demoed on stage, or was shown in all of those highlight reels.

 
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The problem I have with that is the RT results don't look significantly better. Mostly when switching between RTX on and off, the results look different, but not obviously better. If the framerate plummets to get 'more accurate even if you can't really notice it much' then it's not an obvious win for RT. What I need to see from raytracing, if framerate and res are going to be limited, is looking a generation ahead, as raytraced graphics are capable of. Either that or producing marginally better/different results but at greater ease and realism (dynamic lighting, less artefacts). At the moment we're in the space of 'still looks like current gen games' rather than 'approaching photorealism'; the needle for improvement is only shifting slightly.

I understand what you mean, but that shift your looking for might not happen one month after RT made it to the consumer market. I do think that if a certain capable developer would design around it, things may look much better.
RT came to us 2018, and 2018 games arent really that bad at all, like someone said, its 'night and day' difference for the things it was supposed to do.
I'd like to compare it to the early 2000's, where hardware like the PS2, vertex and pixel shaders made appearance, devs got quit much out it after a while, but in the beginning it wasnt that much of a difference with previous tech.

At some point, to make a large leap in visual quality, RT is going to have to happen, especially on console. 8 years is a long time to wait.

Most likely, but as already now i think theres quit many games already supporting RT, considering its so new and expensive for consumers. Then maybe MS may go RT and new tech, all their games or most are pc too. The new Halo could be something. Seeing MS has quired new studios and is going to have more AAA games like sony.

That said, I'd probably turn it off to play my games at 60fps, lol

Or more, BF5 runs at what, atleast 120fps everything ultra on RTX gpus, native 4k? Wouldnt personally see the need for such extreme FPS ranges, maybe for VR.

As for ray-tracing just looking different, and not better, I think this vid does a better job of showing the improvements than what Nvidia demoed on stage, or was shown in all of those highlight reels.

Looks next gen to me, but thats an opinion and differs for everyone. Honestly i think Mesh shading seems atleast as promising, hope amd can get to the same level in a few years with primitiv shading.
 
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Looks next gen to me, but thats an opinion and differs for everyone. Honestly i think Mesh shading seems atleast as promising, hope amd can get to the same level in a few years with primitiv shading.

The thing with gaming is we're all used to how gamey they look. We're used to incorrect lighting, and incorrect shadows, so in a sense they look correct. You show a gamer a pic from a cutting edge game and it looks right, because it looks like what they expect. The reality is, it's pretty fucked up in terms of realism, for games that are trying to approach realism. And sure, even when you're diverging from realism, like something Pixar animated, all of the real properties of light can still help it look better.

AO is one of those features that is just odd and horrible with a big performance hit. You turn it on and it can add some nice depth to a scene, but then if you really notice all of the ways it breaks it sucks, and then you can't unsee it. Ray-traced AO will have a performance hit, but it also won't look fucked up.

We're also incredibly used to how static game worlds are, that we can't appreciate how much better they'd look if they were dynamic. If you look at what Remedy did with Alan Wake, and Quantum Break, they had to make massive compromises to try to fit in a dynamic lighting system that still looked pretty artificial for their time, so most studios don't even try. They work within the confines of the hardware, which is good at doing very limited static environments. We're just used to the limitations.
 
@Scott_Arm
Yes exactly what i was thinking, what do people expect from graphics a few years from now? I think were moving towards more realism, physics and perhaps audio and AI/deep learning. Mesh rendering could help too, RT is just a part of it.
Looking at BF5, RDR2 or any of the modern games im thinking what can they do more, adding the above might be next gen.
 
Looking forward to DF to sell it to everyone. Haha

Honestly though DXR or not. They do a better job selling games to me than most trailers from the official company. I almost bought Shadow of War!

I agree, wonder if DF is sponsored by game devs? :p Played GoW and HZD the games were good or even great depending but the graphics wherent as DF hyped them.
 
The thing with gaming is we're all used to how gamey they look. We're used to incorrect lighting, and incorrect shadows, so in a sense they look correct. You show a gamer a pic from a cutting edge game and it looks right, because it looks like what they expect. The reality is, it's pretty fucked up in terms of realism, for games that are trying to approach realism. And sure, even when you're diverging from realism, like something Pixar animated, all of the real properties of light can still help it look better.

AO is one of those features that is just odd and horrible with a big performance hit. You turn it on and it can add some nice depth to a scene, but then if you really notice all of the ways it breaks it sucks, and then you can't unsee it. Ray-traced AO will have a performance hit, but it also won't look fucked up.

We're also incredibly used to how static game worlds are, that we can't appreciate how much better they'd look if they were dynamic. If you look at what Remedy did with Alan Wake, and Quantum Break, they had to make massive compromises to try to fit in a dynamic lighting system that still looked pretty artificial for their time, so most studios don't even try. They work within the confines of the hardware, which is good at doing very limited static environments. We're just used to the limitations.

From what devs told on twitter shadowing and ambient occlusion can be done on next generation console via compute without RTX.

In case of Power VR raytraced soft-shdows goes faster than cascaded shadows maps
https://www.imgtec.com/blog/implementing-fast-ray-traced-soft-shadows-in-a-game-engine/

https://www.imgtec.com/blog/ray-traced-shadows-vs-cascaded-shadow-maps/

Screen space AO and shadows maps have a big hit in performance too and the quality is not as good as raytrace AO or shadows
 
Understandably there are 2 major opposing angles against DXR. One the PC angle, and I can probably summarize this angle as; DXR goes against their hobby. And your quote here more or less sums it up:
This is the problem with the current first gen RTX cards. PC gamers who spend what it costs to get a RTX card want or are used to 100+ frames and at least 2k resolution. I've been told so many times by my "PC elitists" buddies or read on forums how 60 FPS is trash compared to 144fps.

The hobby of more horse power. For the longest time we've seen PC hobbyist pay top dollar to smash as many cards together to just get more and more performance. And this release really just completely 'resets' that entire mindset. Because RT isn't an upgrade to their car engine. RT is a different car entirely. And moving to this car, they lose all the benefits of their old car. There is a shift that needs to complete here for those people, and it will come as they see more benefit with owning the RT vehicle so to speak.

All in all, this is waiting game to see the opinions turn around on this one. It won't die out like PhysX or anything, I am always expecting a DF face off with PC RTX vs PC Ultra vs Xbox vs PS4.

The second angle is the console angle, it's slightly different. I will summarize this issue as being more of the opposite in which we likely hold 1P AAA studio titles as being the absolute cream of the crop of what a fully utilized console can do, and we don't hold the hardware as responsible. And we extrapolate that benchmark made by that studio and think, wow imagine what they could with 12 TF of power, I mean have you seen God of War, Spider Man and TLOU2 or Ghosts?

And I think what Shifty wrote here is more or less a variation of that: I've seen this before, it's not that much better.
The problem I have with that is the RT results don't look significantly better. Mostly when switching between RTX on and off, the results look different, but not obviously better. If the framerate plummets to get 'more accurate even if you can't really notice it much' then it's not an obvious win for RT. What I need to see from raytracing, if framerate and res are going to be limited, is looking a generation ahead, as raytraced graphics are capable of. Either that or producing marginally better/different results but at greater ease and realism (dynamic lighting, less artefacts). At the moment we're in the space of 'still looks like current gen games' rather than 'approaching photorealism'; the needle for improvement is only shifting slightly.

And you know what, maybe you're not wrong. Maybe we haven't been listening to this more intently. Perhaps it's entirely possible that the upper end of what the best developers can do with massive resources can take 10+ TF and find ways to just milk the hardware to take the game to the next level that perhaps RT can't compete with, or rather the compromises on resolution and frame rate are too great to compete with.

But there's a caveat there, rather several, that aren't in favour in going this route.
the first is the time it costs to put these marvel titles out there.
Compared to last generation:
  • ND released 4 titles last gen. They've only released 1 this gen, and TLOU2 isn't coming 2019, so at best it's coming out in 2020 when next generation arrived
  • Epic 4 titles - Gears 1-3 + Judgement -- we've seen only 2 Gears max this generation
  • Halo - 3/4/Reach/ODST vs at absolute most 2, likely just 1 before next generation arrives
  • Rockstar released only RDR2 -- GTAV was a remaster.
  • SMS - God of War 4 vs Gow 3 + Absolution if you discount the time they spent on 2 PSP titles
  • Polyphony - GT Sport VS GT 4/5 - 2 very complete titles last gen, only 1 title this gen with what many feel lack the amount of content as they are used to
So it's costly.
Should we be basing an entire generation around what the 'few' top studios can accomplish on the absolute upper end of rasterization optimization ? or does it make sense to consider a generation as a large shift of the mean of all the studios put together?

If we're talking console generations, I would hope it's the latter, I'm not interested in buying new hardware to see more of the same and once in a while get treated to a great 8 hr experience at 30fps in an adventure open world tightly controlled game, nor will I define a console 'winner' on a racing game that for the most part, most of the owners don't play.

The second is: if time is indeed costs; studios who want the best graphics can put out more titles faster than before, so not only would you have a better graphics across your library as a whole, but you're likely to have more of them.

The third caveat is but one that is often forgotten.
You're comparing PC Ultra settings DXR off vs PC Ultra settings with DXR On with a 2080TI. Your next gen console can't even reproduce those graphics with DXR off cause it's ain't going to be 13+ TF of Turing architecture, so we shouldn't even expect most next gen titles to get to that level of graphics before we even discuss DXR. You're comparing Ultra settings which do their best to get as close as possible to RT with actual RT and mistakenly assumed next-gen consoles are capable of Ultra when they are only capable of medium settings for the most part.

And very few games out there have dynamic GI. We can count them on our fingers. Dynamic GI is something that needed to be discussed and planned for at the beginning of title development, and we're seeing these developers add this render path within a year.

And last point, because our bias is to use the best of studios to represent what can be accomplished within the console verse, our bias are skewed because we don't see what these AAA exclusives could look like on PC ultra settings. But soon enough over the next 2 years when we see DXR title by DXR title come out, with more GI, shadows, AO, reflections, all these neat things AAA 1P found ways to optimize into their game, go everywhere abundantly without restriction, AAA 1P titles aren't going to be as special. And over time your opinion of what is the best looking will change and you'll wonder how you could possibly go into next gen without it.

Like the PC-centric angle, the goal here is for pro-RT folks to just wait and let the results do their work.

At this point in time, there's really no debate, we just need to sit back and wait for everyone else to have their moment and say, yup, it's now at the point where this makes sense for me. If next gen was coming out this year or next, this is a crazy debate. But I've got 2 full years of time on my side. 2 full years of PC titles coming out with new DXR options, and each time they bake the next RT effect into the engine, we're going to see it in the next set of games as well etc. Those console AAA 1P pedestal titles won't seem so special anymore.
 
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From what devs told on twitter shadowing and ambient occlusion can be done on next generation console via compute without RTX.

Yeah, just slower. I think RT can even be done on One X with a push in some regard.

And last point, because our bias is to use the best of studios to represent what can be accomplished within the console verse, our bias are skewed because we don't see what these AAA exclusives could look like on PC ultra settings. But soon enough over the next 2 years when we see DXR title by DXR title come out, with more GI, shadows, AO, reflections, all these neat things AAA 1P found ways to optimize into their game, go everywhere abundantly without restriction, AAA 1P titles aren't going to be as special. And over time your opinion of what is the best looking will change and you'll wonder how you could possibly go into next gen without it.

Like the PC-centric angle, the goal here is for pro-RT folks to just wait and let the results do their work.

At this point in time, there's really no debate, we just need to sit back and wait for everyone else to have their moment and say, yup, it's now at the point where this makes sense for me. If next gen was coming out this year or next, this is a crazy debate. But I've got 2 full years of time on my side. 2 full years of PC titles coming out with new DXR options, and each time they bake the next RT effect into the engine, we're going to see it in the next set of games as well etc. Those console AAA 1P pedestal titles won't seem so special anymore.

I like your whole post, i think its fair and summarizes the whole Turing, console debate very well. I think the same but dont know how to put it the way your doing.
Cant agree more, and like the youtube video i posted, the differences between Ultra without DXR vs One X is quit huge, especially in the screen space reflections, draw distance, assets and to some extend lighting. This is also at a native 4k/HDR, running at 120+ fps, mostly much more then that. The one X version mostly doesnt run 4k natively according to DF. And thats talking the One X version, presumably the least played console version, most will have base ps4 experience.
 
Yeah, just slower. I think RT can even be done on One X with a push in some regard.



I like your whole post, i think its fair and summarizes the whole Turing, console debate very well. I think the same but dont know how to put it the way your doing.
Cant agree more, and like the youtube video i posted, the differences between Ultra without DXR vs One X is quit huge, especially in the screen space reflections, draw distance, assets and to some extend lighting. This is also at a native 4k/HDR, running at 120+ fps, mostly much more then that. The one X version mostly doesnt run 4k natively according to DF. And thats talking the One X version, presumably the least played console version, most will have base ps4 experience.

Slower but they think it will be usable for next gen it was an answer of Mogan McGuire after a question. No reflexion or other effect just raytraced shadows and raytracing ao.
 
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