91–100 of 235 posts
So why DX12 and not Vulkan? It's time for MS to start helping the industry instead of proliferating lock-in and complicating things for engine developers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXo0WdlELJk I'm pleased to see that the tech video includes spherical mirrors. As I understand it, all raytracing demos are obliged by universal law to include at least three reflective balls in any promotion of the technology. One day, someone will figure out a game where these super-shiny ball bearings are a critical part of the gameplay, and at that point, raytracing will finally ta…
Even in AAA games of today with amazing graphics, I still see polygons in cylindrical, conical and round objects (I'm not talking about raytracing but regular rendering). Everything looks so realistic, but a well or bucket [1] or some other cylindrical object you encounter looks not round but faceted, breaking the suspension of disbelief. Raytracing may bring more roundness, but why not quadratic surfaces or some oth…
Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution for almost as long as I can remember. It's quite exciting that so many of the big players seem to believe it is almost time.
> Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution... Mostly it has seemed like it's been everyone except the actual graphics programmers.
Limited uses? Sure. Otherwise hell no. It's never been more than a gimmick GPU vendors use to show off (in real-time, offline rendering is something else entirely).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXo0WdlELJk I'm pleased to see that the tech video includes spherical mirrors. As I understand it, all raytracing demos are obliged by universal law to include at least three reflective balls in any promotion of the technology. One day, someone will figure out a game where these super-shiny ball bearings are a critical part of the gameplay, and at that point, raytracing will finally ta…
I think generally with many of the tricks that have come out of SIGGRAPH for the last decade, we've really reached a point where, computationally, raytracing really is starting to have the advantage over rasterization in terms of both pixel count and object count. The struggle for the next 30 years however is going to be overcoming the tooling built around rasterization, and to a lesser extent the headstart rasterization has had in terms of hardware.
Not to sound too crazy but I also have a strong suspicion that if you tied a physics engine to a raytracer, you might get your physics 'for free' which could be a big deal for pushing forward more realistic physics too.
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I agree that PBR is awesome, but PBR doesn't slow things down, it is just a replacement by less accurate equations (BlinnPhong ambient,diffuse,specular) with better equations (GGX albeido, roughness, metallic, clearcoat, sheen) that are generally the same complexity. It is sort of neutral on render time for the most part. In time, I am sure we will be in a raytraced future if GPU trends continue.
Physically based rendering is _not_ the Disney shader and renaming your diffuse maps to albedo because it sounds more sciencey. It’s about the wholesale switch to a fully path-traced framework with a consistent mathematical foundation as opposed to the layered system of hacks and chained prepasses that prevailed in the early 2000’s
That's why I'm saying the combination of PBR and tracing is a huge productivity boon to both sides, art and tech. It has a performance cost, but if/when hardware can pay that cost in real time, games absolutely will use it.
Friendly reminder DirectX is a proprietary windows-specific API, with its associated lock-in. Don't fall for such simple trap.
Have fun shipping a real product on OpenGL without a proprietary binary driver blob.
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> Graphics programmers have been predicting this revolution... Mostly it has seemed like it's been everyone except the actual graphics programmers.
Yep. There's a billion and a half reasons you wouldn't use full-blown path tracing for games. It'll always perform worse regardless of what you do, the frame budgeting is likely going to be a total nightmare, the tree search you need to trace rays requires too much branching to map well to GPUs (it's perfectly possible, just another absolute nightmare as your complexity goes up), console GPUs are (and have always bee…
So why DX12 and not Vulkan? It's time for MS to start helping the industry instead of proliferating lock-in and complicating things for engine developers.
I don't know why you're getting downvotes. DirectX is harmful for consumers and only serves to lock in games and users to Microsoft Windows.
More discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620515
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It actually means a lot more than that in offline VFX. It was the games industry that decided it meant “use the Disney shader”.
I updated my comment. I guess I need to read up on that. I read of so many areas in which PBR stops short in offline contexts, like using constant BRDFs which is a little unnecessary with offline rendering. What am I not understanding there?