141–150 of 235 posts
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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.
The only issue is that a lot of this is already possible in the current renderers at a reduced cost. - Soft shadows work in WebGL fairly well using PCSS: https://clara.io/player/v2/8f49e7c3-7c5e-43f0-a09c-33a55bb1b... - Translucency can be faked effectively using a few different methods. https://clara.io/view/5c7d28c0-91d7-4432-a131-3e6fd657a042 - Screen space ambient occlusion, if using SAO, is amazing. SAO test: ht…
Everybody in CG knows that raytracing is the graal in that it allows a unique, universal rendering model and that triangle-based techniques are always hacks aimed at approximating a raytracing result (or even better, a radiosity-based algorithm)
We have always surfed on the edge between cramming more millions of triangles in our graphic cards and being able to make a complex calculation per pixel. It is arguable that if hardware manufacturers had taken a different path, GPUs would be more comfortable with raytracing now as it requires a very different architecture (make lookups in a big scene cheap vs matrix operations)
From time to time, big player test the water with raytracing and often are not followed by the crowd of developers afraid to change their ways.
I wish that one day we cross that bridge.
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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.
In Satya's Microsoft, it's pretty much guaranteed that DirectX is going to go the route of .NET and be largely open and multi-platform. I almost bet within a year, we'll get a Hacker News article with just that announcement...
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I don't think pure raytracing and ray traced global illumination are going to be adopted by many games if there is still such a giant problem with noise. That is far from a solved problem, even in multi-hour per from visual effects renders.
I guess with games there is already temporal anti-aliasing (TAA), so that would be an effective denoising technique if one was using noisy ray/path tracing.
The only issue is that a lot of this is already possible in the current renderers at a reduced cost. - Soft shadows work in WebGL fairly well using PCSS: https://clara.io/player/v2/8f49e7c3-7c5e-43f0-a09c-33a55bb1b... - Translucency can be faked effectively using a few different methods. https://clara.io/view/5c7d28c0-91d7-4432-a131-3e6fd657a042 - Screen space ambient occlusion, if using SAO, is amazing. SAO test: ht…
>My experience with the game industry, even if you have a better way of doing things, if it takes more CPU/GPU cycles that a hack that achieves basically the same quality, it will not be adopted. It is that simple. That's not always the case. Physically based materials, tonemapping and many more were widely adopted in game engines because they're easier to get proper and predictable results with. It's the same with m…
For a long time, games pushed the graphics envelope, but that doesn't seem the case any more. So perhaps that's less important today, and GPUs have overshot gamer needs.
OTOH, development costs of AAA games are incredibly high. with larger worlds at higher res. Even worse at 4K.
So the question of the magnitudes remains.
2018: the year of raytracing in games, finally?
A data-point is that Imagination has had hardware raytracing for several years now: https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/ But without publicised success.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12546/nvidia-unveils-rtx-tech...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...
I haven't touched a PC game in ages, would be fun to come back and see some epic like HL3 done up in this.
AMD has a free ray tracing renderer called Radeon ProRender https://pro.radeon.com/en/software/prorender . Supported by Maya and Blender among others ...
It's too slow to be relevant.
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.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...
Friendly reminder DirectX is a proprietary windows-specific API, with its associated lock-in. Don't fall for such simple trap.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...
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> 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. The PowerVR guys added special purpose hardware for doing spatial lookups for raytracing.
And it's awesome. [1] Getting shadows right for the specifics of a game is a nightmare; balancing shadow acne and performance. Just being able to do one-size-fits-all shadows on desktops would be a major step forward. [1]: https://www.imgtec.com/blog/ray-traced-shadows-vs-cascaded-s...
Shadows are probably one of the places where raytracing makes a lot of sense though. It's one of few shadow rendering techniques that don't blow a ton of precious fillrate, and it shouldn't take too many rays.