Poll: Do you care about ray tracing / upscaling?

[Mahboi]

Because Art/Design is everything. Look how beautiful ORI.

Awhile back I talked to a Tools engineer for AAA game studios for a bit (Taylor Hadden).
One thing that I remember very well was how I assumed that a lot of the weight on gamedev was about optimisation and technicals. Not at all. He said that 90% of all game dev time wastes was in making an artistically coherent and good looking game. That was the huge time and money sinker. From Hollow Knight to Assassins Creed.

It's not just that. Game engine developers have spent the last 30 years optimizing the rasterization tricks to look like as if they were simulations (raytracing).

That's why the latest screen space ambient occlusion don't look much worse than raytraced ambient occlusion, why screen space reflections don't look much worse than raytraced reflections, why screen space global illumination doesn't look much worse than raytraced global illumination, etc.
And all of them have a computational cost that is a fraction of the raytraced alternatives.

And the massive computational leeway from using rasterization can let a beautiful game run on a much cheaper and lower power device, or it can be used to process micro-polygons in the shader processors to reach incredible geometric detail (UE5 Nanite).

Also this. For all the "falsehood" of it, raster has been about taking 30 years of progress in making games functional at a lower computational cost per frame.
RT is just brute forcing it. It's great that we don't need to use petty tricks and can just brute force it, it really shows how far we've come, but...it's throwing away a toolchain of 30+ years of experience and techniques for something immensely less cost effective and better.

In a way, it's akin to electric cars: they're pretty much a better technology in every single last way, but they cost a lot more and good old petrol cars happen to work just as fine and to be as refined/optimised as they've ever been.

 

[Aapje]

One thing that I remember very well was how I assumed that a lot of the weight on gamedev was about optimisation and technicals. Not at all. He said that 90% of all game dev time wastes was in making an artistically coherent and good looking game.

A big reason for that is that they are using existing game engines, so most of the work is already done.

From Hollow Knight to Assassins Creed.

Unity and Anvil game engine, respectively.

 

[SolidQ]

Old video, but interesting. Despite the fact that, alot people claiming AMD can't do RT

 

[igor_kavinski]

Unless some impartial developer creates their own RT benchmark scene, no matter how simple or how complex, and explains clearly why we see different RT performance impacts on the different cards with good technical explanation in layman terms, we have to assume that most RT games run like molasses thanks to the Geforce RTX implementation.

People don't play games to pinpoint lighting defects or shortcomings in every scene so there is no reason to force a realistic RT implementation on gamers and keep them upgrading every generation to get playable framerates and then actually go ahead and degrade the image quality with their DLSS crapscaling so they can claim that they made realistic RT affordable for gamers when in point of fact, RT cannot enhance the quality of a crappy lower resolution image upscaled artificially.

Sure, it's clever trickery like video or audio compression where most brains may not be able to tell the difference but marketing their cards as the "Ultimate in RT" is nothing short of a huge, huge scam meant to keep AMD from appearing as a competitive alternative. In the larger scheme of things, it's actually distracting the game developers from concentrating on the fun factor of the gameplay and instead, they focus on visual fidelity and call it a day, giving people flawed gameplay that's not as good as it could be.

 

[SolidQ]

, huge scam meant to keep AMD from appearing as a competitive alternative

That how it looks

Spoiler

People don't play games to pinpoint lighting defects or shortcomings in every scene

Alot people playing like palworlds games, also other games with cartoon style graphic.

At least we have Lumen in UE5, and it's very nice lightning and doesn't need card with RT.


Another Zoom/Slow/Stop edition comparision. Which pretty useless

Xess is a bit blurred?

 

[tamz_msc]

FSR has been garbage in terms of image quality in every game I've tried so far - and my target resolution is 1080p. XeSS has been superior for temporal stability ever since version 1.2.

 

[SolidQ]

FSR has been garbage in terms of image quality in every game I've tried so far - and my target resolution is 1080p. XeSS has been superior for temporal stability ever since version 1.2.

Xess only found good in Robocop. FSR good in Judgment/LostJudgment, Xess too blurred in this games. in GhostWire that was surprised to me is FSR > Natvie. etc

 

[tamz_msc]

Xess only found good in Robocop. FSR good in Judgment/LostJudgment, Xess too blurred in this games. in GhostWire that was surprised to me is FSR > Natvie. etc

If you find XeSS blurry at 1080p, then wait till you try FSR at that resolution.

 

[SolidQ]

then wait till you try FSR at that resolution.

i've played at this resolution few games and it's fine

 

[tamz_msc]

i've played at this resolution few games and it's fine

It's unbearably crap. Temporal stability of FSR is garbage, for every version of FSR 2.x.

 

[SolidQ]

It's unbearably crap

Crap?
Ok special for you.
FSR

Native

Xess

As you see Xess is blurred

 

[tamz_msc]

Crap?
Ok special for you.
FSR

Native

Xess

As you see Xess is blurred

Uh...still images don't prove anything.

 

[SolidQ]

still images don't prove anything.

Proves. Who cares about temporal stability, if Sharp/Blur is most matter in image quality?
Do you know very alot peoples playing games with blur/jagged IQ even in Native, and don't care about it.

 

[Aapje]

FSR is worse at lower resolutions, but not so bad at 1440p and especially 4k.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Wait till NV invents Raster lighting optimizations so we can get get "almost as good as RT" visuals at 2-3x the performance!

 

[tamz_msc]

Proves. Who cares about temporal stability, if Sharp/Blur is most matter in image quality?
Do you know very alot peoples playing games with blur/jagged IQ even in Native, and don't care about it.

Temporal stability is way more important than slight reduction in image sharpness. Because everything - from image quality in motion, particle effects, post processing, screen space stuff - are affected by it, one way or the other.

 

[SolidQ]

Temporal stability is way more important than slight reduction in image sharpness.

I doesn't have problem with TS, because it's almost unnoticeable. Jagged one of farthest object is nothing to me.

Because everything - from image quality in motion, particle effects, post processing, screen space stuff - are affected by it, one way or the other.

it's super hard notice, unless you playing games with 6-25%, instead normal speed.

FSR is worse at lower resolutions, but not so bad at 1440p and especially 4k.

not in every game. in Ghostwire it's even beat Native in 1080+
From what i've played, only in RE4 have blurred background.
GoW, RDR2, Judgment, Ghostwire, Tina, was playing without problems.


Interesting Video

 

[jarablue]

I love dlss when I need it. Ray and Path tracing to me are pretty cool. I love it!

DLAA is how I roll if I can get my fps near 120. Keep on bangin nvidia. Just lower your freaking prices man!

 

[SolidQ]

Without RTX looks better

Pretty crap. Floor with Keyboard buttons?

 

[Aapje]

A desperate attempt to make RT happen.

 

[SolidQ]

Resident Evil Path Tracing!​

2/3/4/7

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1chawwd/resident_evil_path_tracing

RE7 Outdoor seems broken

 

[Saylick]

A big reason for that is that they are using existing game engines, so most of the work is already done.

Also why Nvidia had great success with inserting their engineers within game studios to do the optimization work for them. If the game developers are too busy polishing the art direction, I'm sure they'll gladly let an outsider do the optimization work essentially for free, albeit the optimization is going to be biased towards one vendor over another.

 

[Saylick]

Saw this survey result on Xitter. Results aren’t surprising to say the least.

 

[igor_kavinski]

I think game engines need to have some kind of a perfomance/quality optimizer built-in. Either accept some quality preset and get right into the game or let the optimizer run some tests and do its thing and present you with different quality settings, each with screenshots to show how the image will differ. Then the user can make an informed decision based on his/her preference on whether they want high fps gameplay or if they feel like stopping and smelling the roses and enjoy the scenery at a leisurely pace.

I also don't get why there isn't developer commentary in the graphics settings. Each quality setting should have some "more info" or question mark button that when clicked, shows the developer's comments or notes on what that quality setting does, what kind of compromises the user is looking at in terms of performance/quality ratio etc. Something like this can only be expected from passionate developers though. Typical "just get the game out ASAP!" megastudios like EA/Ubisoft/Take Two won't be bothered to go to these lengths to appease a certain subset of the gamer population.

 

[psolord]

Oh wow, you can use FSR3FG with DLSS now!

Ghost of Tsushima allows NVIDIA DLSS upscaling to work alongside AMD FSR3 frame generation - VideoCardz.com

Frame Generation for more gamers by combining NVIDIA and AMD technologies Gamers whose GPUs do not support DLSS3 Frame Generation, can now use an alternative with AMD technology. Officially, NVIDIA DLSS3 Frame Generation only works with GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards, but with more games getting...

videocardz.com