DegustatoR
Legend
Games using UE5 will have that option but games made on other tech? This is where the cost/time savings will come in and likely force games to require h/w RT support.
- Status
I can’t imagine lots of game devs will implement software RT paths. They will either go hard on RT and do the bare minimum for non-RT hardware or they will prioritize the install base of non RT cards and RT will be an afterthought. Only a few devs fall in the first category so far. 4A games being the most prominent.
I don't think adding a software path would take that much dev time. I am not talking about that specific approach Epic went with UE5, but I am talking about the classic running DXR triangle-Raytracing in software. Isn't Nvidia's Pascal Generation kind of doing that automatically?
With so many non-RT enabled cards in the PC market it would make no sense not adding a software RT path. That's how you get saved dev time/cost and a large userbase combined.
DegustatoR
Legend
On the contrary, the vast majority - i.e. new consoles - of their target h/w will support RT. Some developers may not want to use it due to performance implications but that's a different story.
This would be close to being useless as s/w "emulation" of DXR won't work fast enough on pretty much anything with the possible exception of 1080Ti. And anything faster than that is likely to have RT h/w in it.
It depends.
It doesn't do that bad. Keep in mind the important thing for the userbase is that it's running at all. Of course a 1060 won't achieve 1080p and 30 FPS in a RT enabled next gen title, but maybe 720p30 at lowest settings, so the vast majority can still play that game. Also new upscaling tech like FSR 2.0 will help a ton here.
So yeah, Software-RT absolutely makes sense here.
DegustatoR
Legend
Yeah, I knew it would be BFV before clicking "play" )
The rest aren't doing that well, and BFV was like the first title using RT h/w.
I wouldn't count on future games running too well through this "emulation".
Also this is completely MIA on AMD and Intel.
Same for hand-tuned temporal reconstruction, it adds only to dev time, worse result and performance aswell. It is better to invest in future tech i think.
The nostalgia. I remember this appearing in 2018 (about 4 years ago now, over half a console generation) on digital foundry and people being amazed by the reflections.... Look where we are nowadays.
I remembered now, it was one of Dictator's awesome videos that I mis-remembered as being a GDC presentation slide deck.
Direct link to the section in question about what RT means from the development/artist side of things.Consoles are a useful baseline for hardware RT support but I’m not expecting miracles in terms of actual usage. The performance just isn’t there. Hopefully we get a lot more titles like Control, Chernobylite, Cyberpunk, DL2 and Metro:EE but I doubt they will be the majority.
What about it?
DegustatoR
Legend
We're not. It will probably have s/w Lumen option for some time. Whether this will be exposed/used on consoles/PC and with what quality implications remains to be seen.
That's not a different story, though. That is kinda the point here.
While PS5 and XSX are capable of h/w ray tracing, they're still not very good at it. Devs will have to give up quite a lot somewhere else in order to use it, and many will likely not consider it worth it, given there *is* still plenty of room in other areas of graphics to improve heavily with the new hardware. Ray tracing is not like the defining aspect of next gen visuals at all.
So I can see next gen games being a solid mix of games that utilize ray tracing and games that dont, or at least use it minimally. Of the games that dont, some might have additional options for RT on PC, but some that use RT on console might also have options to not use RT on PC as well.
Basically, 'rasterization' performance will remain relevant. Maybe by next generation, the hardware will be powerful enough to where ray tracing is just considered an inherent aspect of the visuals and will take up a proportionally smaller amount of the overall demands, but until then, the baseline is the consoles and they aren't great at this, and I think that will absolutely mean we're not yet in a place to say that non-RT performance wont matter anymore.
Obviously if Lovelace still has an advantage over RDNA3 in ray tracing, it will still be a selling point for sure, but it's not the end all, be all.
DegustatoR
Legend
No, it's not. There will always be some developers who won't be willing to use RT h/w. Hell, there are developers now who are unwilling to use texture filtering h/w. This doesn't change the fact that your GPU is very much required to support said operation for the vast majority of games to even launch on it. Even more so, those games which won't require RT h/w per se will likely still require a DX12U GPU - because that's what is there in new consoles.
And since the choice to not use RT h/w at all will likely be coupled with the need to hit high framerates on consoles - it is highly likely that such games would run at >200 fps on future PC h/w anyway. And we're back to the original point where no one really cares if some "rasterization only" game runs at 250 fps and not at 300 fps on a card selling for $1000. It's the most h/w demanding games which will be looked at as the measure of h/w quality, and these are all likely to be using RT h/w in the future.
I'd argue that it is. It is the biggest change this new generation has brought so far (in graphics at least). The rest are just the usual extensive improvements which are fairly hard to see for a general console gamer. Hence why games like HFW or FH5 running on PS4/XBO look rather close to how they do on PS5/XS. RT changes that.
Well you see "minimally" would still be a requirement. Also it is very likely that there will eventually be usages for RT h/w even in those games which will target high framerate. Whether it will be possible to just turn these off without loosing anything of value remains to be seen.
UE5 won't be any different just because they have a competent SW-RT solution.
Infact, I think the SW-Lumen path is considered deprecated from a development perspective. I do not think they will continue to put a lot of resources in it because it's literally as good as it can get and it doesn't make sense to concentrate too much on old hardware. The lighting quality is already crazy at this kind of performance on a non-RT enabled card.
Epic is probably hard at work improving the Hardware-Lumen path, increasing both performance and quality for 30 fps as well as 60 fps targets. I mean we just saw these cool transparent reflections being added, I doubt these will work with SW-Lumen.
This is a pretty weak argument given we've seen almost nothing of actual next gen games so far. You're literally naming cross-gen titles here, and I'd also add that even of those two games you specifically mention, they do NOT actually look 'rather close' to how they do on the old generation hardware. They are way better looking on the proper XSX/PS5 machines. I also disagree completely that these games having ray tracing would substantially improve their visuals. Their lighting systems are already very good and both do a good job in terms of small scale shadows and ambient occlusion and whatnot to provide a good sense of depth and placement in scenes for the huge density of objects in them. Ray tracing may be able to refine these aspects, but it wouldn't transform the visuals by any means. I mean, these games both look better as a whole than basically all of the other 'last gen but now with ray tracing' cross gen games we've seen.
I mean, heck, most of us before the specs of the new consoles was announced didn't even expect them to have ray tracing hardware whatsoever. Any reasonable person would not have then surmised that, "Oh without ray tracing acceleration, there's not actually gonna be any significant room for improvement in graphics this generation". Maybe some clueless Nvidia fanboys might have thought that, but there would otherwise still be the expectation of a meaningful leap in the graphics and ambitions of games on much more powerful hardware, even if just in more predictable areas(though something like Nanite does prove there's still other revolutions possible).
Good developers will be able to make incredible looking next gen games on XSX/PS5 without ray tracing. The improvements achieved using RT just isn't always going to be worth the compromises that will need to be made elsewhere to make room for them. Again, if there wasn't still big improvements possible elsewhere then sure, ray tracing would be a no-brainer use of the power overhead of the new consoles for almost any game, but this isn't the case, and the consoles are still limited, fixed spec machines that also happen to not actually be very good at ray tracing. It basically cannot be the defining aspect of this upcoming generation. Not to say it wont be common, just that it's not necessarily gonna be the main wow factor in next gen titles and not using it will not mean 'irrelevance' by any means.
I guess that we have to agree to disagree.
I'm very sensitive to lighting and baked maps don't cut it anymore when you have tasted RT.
Look at Dying Light 2 for example:
- Status
Similar threads
