Showerthoughts

29827 readers

499 users here now

A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

Rules

All posts must be showerthoughts
The entire showerthought must be in the title
Avoid politics
- 3.1) NEW RULE as of 5 Nov 2024, trying it out
- 3.2) Political posts often end up being circle jerks (not offering unique perspective) or enflaming (too much work for mods).
- 3.3) Try c/politicaldiscussion, volunteer as a mod here, or start your own community.
Posts must be original/unique
Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

285

After six years of hardware ray tracing, the best examples of it are modified old games, like Quake and Minecraft. (midwest.social)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There might be a good reason for this. Raster effects were already really good in newer games, and ray tracing could only improve on that high bar. It's filling in details that are barely noticeable, but creap ever so slightly closer to photorealism.

Old games start from a low bar, so ray tracing has dramatic improvement.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I feel like gamedevs and game publishers are more excited about raytracing than consumers, because it would allow them to throw out the entire range of ~~smokes and mirrors~~ tricks currently used for simulating lighting. Which makes the code simpler and cheaper to implement.

Raytracing is really the more obvious way of implementing complex lighting, it's just always been out of reach performance-wise.
Well, it still is. Games still use those same tricks and then only mild raytracing on top for the finishing touches.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.

Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.

Ray tracing also doesn't replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.

The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.

The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.

The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia's money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, fair response. I started writing that comment thinking "if it's in high-end hardware now, it'll be broadly available in 10–20 years".
Then with the last sentence, I realized that it isn't in high-end hardware, not in the form that allows you to throw out all the tricks.
And with publishers simultaneously wanting ever more fidelity, which makes it more expensive to calculate appropriate raytracing, yeah, I would be surprised, if that happens in our lifetime, too.

I guess, I'm personally somewhat excited at the thought of not having to learn all the tricks, with me having dabbled in gamedev as a hobbyist.
But yesterday, the (completely unilluminated) 2D gravity simulation I'm working on started kicking in my fans and you see me immediately investigating, because I'm certainly a lot more excited about making it available to as many people as possible...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I'm not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.

The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the "tricks" that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).

Unfortunately, the bad news is that you'd still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!

Hope you make something cool from the hobby!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I think part of the push is just from Nvidia to try and get vendor lock-in, like they have with CUDA. Many games that use raytracing will only work on "RTX" cards which are only sold by Nvidia. Raytracing also has the benefit of increasing demand for upscaling, like DLSS, which further increases vendor lock-in.

Also, most devs are going to be using some sort of game engine where the hard parts of rasterization are already taken care of, like with Lumen in Unreal Engine 5.