151–160 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.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...
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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...
And needless to say that exactly with Satya Nadella they started Windows S where you can't use any API other than D3D.
They opened dotnet because they wanted to get it on server-side since Windows have very limited exposure on that market. But even today .NET still not multi-platforms in term of UI and for that reason a lot of Windows-specific .NET software wasn't ported. And it's already more than 3 years after release of dotnet core.
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…
PBR proved that we reached the point where the industry had enough of hacks in some domains. 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…
Relevant:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/shedding-some-realis...
"I am 90% sure that the eventual path to integration of ray tracing hardware into consumer devices will be as minor tweaks to the existing GPU microarchitectures." - John Carmack
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>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…
In the realtime performance vs developer time tradeoff, the magnitudes are important... and also, their value . 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 magni…
rolls over, goes back to sleep.
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> 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. Why is that?
To my knowledge, the biggest part of game physics is collision detection. (There's a lot more floats in the geometry of a rigid body than there are in its motion vectors). If you had a perfect raytracer for "free," you could fire out a fiber bundle from moving objects in the direction of their motion to find out what they'd hit.
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…
I'm not sure it's fair to describe those as hacks. Those techniques are also used for animated movies, which take many CPU-years to render. Those "hacks" are used even when artist have huge amounts of hardware, no real-time constraints, and need extremely high quality. Techniques other than raytracing have an artistic place, not merely a pragmatic one.
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.
> DirectX doesn't work anywhere except Windows PC's and the Xbox. And most new phone chipsets. And a lot of old phone chipsets. And a lot of ARM-based single board computers. And a lot of non-Xbox consoles like the Switch have hardware support for DirectX... DirectX is in a lot of places you would not expect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To my knowledge, the biggest part of game physics is collision detection. (There's a lot more floats in the geometry of a rigid body than there are in its motion vectors). If you had a perfect raytracer for "free," you could fire out a fiber bundle from moving objects in the direction of their motion to find out what they'd hit.
How is that free though? You have to fire more rays for each moving object. That's not cheap. And the only thing you get is variable accuracy collision detection.
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…