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  • Don't worry bro just turn on fake frames and upscaling. Now we get shitty graphics AND raytracing at the same time!

  • Raytracing produces realistic visual effects without requiring tricks like ambient occlusion, screen-space reflections, shadow resolution and so on, since those emerge as a result of raytracing anyway and are much more realistic. I'm currently rendering a Donut in Blender where the effects are clearly visible in comparison.

    However, due to the high amount of optimization in visually impressive realtime rendering engines like game engines, I agree with you that I don't see many benefits comparing ray tracing in games with contemporary alternative techniques.

    Nevertheless I think that's the future. In the long run, there's nothing better, i.e. more accurate, than simulating the behavior of light when it comes to visual realism.

    • Also, baked lighting has another cost - nothing that is baked can be dynamic, and it has to be done during development, so it takes up dev resources.

      Raytraced stuff happens immediately without tricks. All you need is the geometry and the materials to be accurate, and it should look right, no questions asked.

      Once we get to a point where raytracing can be assumed even for low end systems, the problem where systems can't run certain games could become a thing of the past. I mean, if manufacturers weren't constantly bombarding us with planned & perceived obsolescence.

      • in the case where you have vehicles with explorable interiors (like the ships in Star Citizen), lighting has to be dynamic because lighting conditions change just as a result of flying around normally. The position of the sun in whichever of the two (current) star systems you're in relative to your ship, and the atmosphere which may or may not be present outside, the position of cargo and objects/materials that will be receiving light and causing it to diffuse onto surrounding surfaces in a cabin also requires at least some kind of reference or it just feels BAD.

        But the recent citizencon engine presentation showed some AMAZING new short cuts that give just enough visual fidelity without tanking the framerate that it scratches some kind of itch DEEP within the predictive modeling of the human mind... when light acts more like it's supposed to, it's fucking magical.

  • Eh, pathtracing is pretty cool, and when used correctly, it can lead to real amazing results, while the artist does not have to care about performance as much. Baked lighting is very nice for static scenes, but it also consumes a lot of storage.

    • Godot's SDFGI seems like a good tradeoff, particularly as it works well on not-super-new GPUs (Juan: "but you can run them great on something old, like an gtx960 or a rx450 and get pretty real-time lighting at 1080").

      It's brilliant.

      • Sdfgi is pretty cool, (I develope with Godot), but for now it's still really hard to figure out the right settings for it to not be a gigant splat fest... Cuz it leaves splats of color all around the place. Outside scenes work a lot better though, so that's cool.

      • It's not really that dynamic yet though, but I looked at their presentation where they talked about future features and they said that support for dynamic objects will be coming. I'm pretty excited about where its going.

        They originally planned to get the improvements out in 4.1 but it looks like they haven't gotten around to it yet. https://github.com/orgs/godotengine/projects/33/views/1?pane=issue&itemId=12571576

    • cyberpunk has a path tracing setting and it gives me even worse performance than ray tracing 😭

  • Can all of you leave the rays alone and stop trying to trace them? It's hard enough to be a living pancake swimming along the ocean floor.

    And don't go bothering Ray either. He's a nice guy and doesn't deserve your BS.

  • I turned off raytracing in 2077 and immediately had a playable experience. So what if the reflections aren't good? They fixed this on switch with SSAO, and that's a cheap way to fix it

177 comments