Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing • Hacker News Board

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#101

Post by Tobba_ » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:14 PM UTC

bhouston wrote: post #97

Tobba_ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe GPU vendors will offer specialized spatial look up trees or something .

To clarify: that's more of a problem in programming the GPU in a portable manner, and that may or may not turn into a problem depending on the implementation. GPUs can do loops that run a different number of times per thread just fine, at the cost of having to wait for the slowest to finish. Things start to turn sideways if you want diverging branches though (at least AMD kind of has support for this, but it's limited). If you want animations to work there's a good chance your search would become pretty complicated and you run the risk of smacking into that.

Also, I doubt GPU vendors would add special-purpose hardware like that. They'd much rather just add some new shader instructions to help doing it.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#102

Post by shmerl » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:17 PM UTC

thelittleone wrote: post #98

swebs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft is the dominant platform for games. What financial gain would they derive from pursuing a non lock in strategy?

That's not a justification for being lock-in jerks. Would you appreciate using ActiveX instead of HTML? We are lucky, MS didn't succeed with the above.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#103

Post by headsoup » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

dfox wrote: post #96

gaius wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have fun shipping a real product on OpenGL without a proprietary binary driver blob.

Both nouveau and amdgpu are good enough for every linux game in my steam library.

Same here, except all the newer games I probably would like to add to my library but can't because Win/DX only...

Nouveau is still problematic because of the lack of access to the NVIDIA proprietary code, i.e. the extra bits like fan management, monitors, etc. That and it's performance still just isn't there against the proprietary drivers. AMD drivers are pretty good and Wine performance has increased significantly over the last year or so.

Hopefully Vulkan encourages more widely supported game dev, it's a terrible thing that gamers are practically locked into the Windows OS by way of proprietary graphics stack and the old catch-22 of 'no market for Linux games/no games on Linux.'

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#104

Post by jenscow » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #78

snvzz wrote: post #31

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.

Reasonable compromise, compared to being aggressively locked into a proprietary platform.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#105

Post by Tobba_ » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:26 PM UTC

Aardwolf wrote: post #39

joosters wrote: post #26

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…

That's just because the industry is stuck using triangles in the art pipeline (and don't put in as much effort into the low-polys as they used to). If they were willing to use some variation of patch-based pipeline so that they could utilize the tessellation hardware that has existed for years, it wouldn't be a problem. I've heard artists are scared of it due to how amazingly awful some editors managed to make the NURBS editing experience, but with a decent editor it really wouldn't be a problem.

Sadly tessellation largely just gets used to screw over AMD performance (for those sweet Nvidia kickbacks; if you're wondering why some games like Crysis 2 tessellate flat surfaces into an insane number of polygons, this is why).

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#106

Post by beamatronic » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

joosters wrote: post #26

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…

Marble Madness?

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#107

Post by trilinearnz » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:29 PM UTC

snvzz wrote: post #31

Friendly reminder DirectX is a proprietary windows-specific API, with its associated lock-in. Don't fall for such simple trap.

While true, it's worth noting that these developments will likely impact the next XBox model too.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#108

Post by swebs » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:33 PM UTC

thelittleone wrote: post #98

swebs wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Microsoft is the dominant platform for games. What financial gain would they derive from pursuing a non lock in strategy?

What would Microsoft have to gain? Absolutely nothing. What do consumers gain. A hell of a lot.

That's why it's foolish to assume Microsoft will change their ways somewhere down the line. The point is that it is us, the users that should be choosing alternatives and not celebrating vendor lock-in.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#109

Post by ino » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:54 PM UTC

tzahola wrote: post #74

WillKirkby wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demosceners are starting to, for sure. https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69642

Video version: https://youtu.be/9r8pxIogxZ0

epilepsy warning

The demo is amazing on its own as a piece of art, let alone it's done programatically, let alone it's rendered in real time, let alone it's just 4k.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#110

Post by oneplane » Mon, Mar 19, 2018, 10:55 PM UTC

That's great.. if you are on Windows. I get that Microsoft works on Microsoft-technology, but it really doesn't help adoption or global development as a whole. DirectX doesn't work anywhere except Windows PC's and the Xbox. That's no biggie for Microsoft, but it's bad for everyone else.