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Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

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Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#41

Post by kuzehanka »

pornel wrote: post #38

I love RTX, but it's so hard to demonstrate it. It doesn't give presence of any "wow!" effect (apart from demos that overdo reflections), it only gives absence of incorrect shadows, and humans are bad at noticing absence of things. Instead of "wow" you get "well, duh, that's how things should look".

Path tracing has huge wow factor. The problem with RTX is that on current gen hardware it runs at laughably low sample rates and the result is very noisy even after DLDN.

Games are handling this by dialling the amplitude of RTX effects way down and having a smoothing pass. After all that is done, the wow effect is gone and you're just left with a more dynamic version of the same or worse aesthetics that we're already used to.

I expect it'll truly take off on next gen hardware, whenever that rolls out.

Here's what RTX+DLDN actually looks like if not dialled down and smoothed: https://youtu.be/CuoER1DwYLY?t=553

My takeaway is yes that quake 2 demo looks really cool, but you just know that they used every black magic hack in the book to get there, and most of it can't be replicated in a modern high fidelity game. It's definitely not a case of flicking an 'RTX on' switch.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#42

Post by leoc »

morganvachon wrote: post #36
kkapelon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doom used 2D sprites, so "fake 3d" if you ask me.

The terms "fake 3D" and "2.5D" in reference to Doom and similar games has nothing to do with sprite based mobs, it's about not having a truly 3D map. Doom's maps were drawn in 2D top-down with a height variable for any wall or platform. You couldn't have one room above another, which is why elevators in the game were solid (you couldn't stand under the floor). The various level editors for Doom based games looked lik…

It's surely both the sprite-based monsters and the "2.5D" world that justify DOOM's "2.5D/fake 3D" label, though indeed more the latter. (System Shock was a transitional example of sprite monsters in an otherwise full-3D world: https://youtu.be/CGKidgwcalM?list=PLqqLcEJ9bUtNedMdW64WioyV9... )

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#43

Post by crote »

hellofunk wrote: post #40

Is this ray tracing or path tracing? I'd think that real-time path tracing would still be hard/impossible in real-time considering the number of samples, but I'm not sure. People throw around these terms interchangeably which complicates the discussion, though the algorithms have notable departures from each other.

0:36 in the video, "all based on path tracing". Easy tell: the soft shadows, volumetric lighting, indirect lighting, complex shaders. Some of it could probably be faked, but it's trivial with path tracing.

About speed: it's still very hard to do real-time, but it seems like denoising algorithms are getting good enough that it's getting doable. Keep in mind that it is a game, so small graphical glitches aren't that big of a deal.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#45

Post by taneq »

dexen wrote: post #21
narrator wrote: post #15

This is great to see. Quake and Doom were all about elaborate fake 3d and elaborate fake raytracing to run fast and look amazing on slow hardware. As technology improved, first we got a real 3d engine and now we finally have a real raytracing engine.

>Quake and Doom were all about elaborate fake 3d A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D" elaborate fakery of 3D. One of examples of the ruse: a level was basically a (floor, ceiling) height map, and there could be no two overlapping rooms one above the other. On the other hand, Quake (1) was an early pioneer [1] of real, actual 3D, including an OpenGL backend and all that. That's o…

> On the other hand, Quake (1) was an early pioneer [1] of real, actual 3D

The Quake rasterizer with its overlapped divide for perspective correction is a thing of beauty and possibly my favourite piece of code ever. If there's anyone out there who loves optimisation and hasn't read Abrash's "black book", it's well worth a read.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#46

Post by omilu »

apk-d wrote: post #5

Rtx really shines when applied to a low-fidelity game like Q2. The difference isn't as profound in modern titles where a plethora of lighting techniques and tricks approximates physical lighting closely, though. I wonder if in the end (should we eventually see universal adoption) raytracing will prove more of a boon towards developers rather than end users, as it has been with many other hardware advancements.

Ray tracing removes a huge development workload, you no longer have to think about modeling light. It's like real life, you simply have materials and light sources, and bang everything just works and looks natural.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#47

Post by josteink »

dexen wrote: post #21
narrator wrote: post #15

This is great to see. Quake and Doom were all about elaborate fake 3d and elaborate fake raytracing to run fast and look amazing on slow hardware. As technology improved, first we got a real 3d engine and now we finally have a real raytracing engine.

>Quake and Doom were all about elaborate fake 3d A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D" elaborate fakery of 3D. One of examples of the ruse: a level was basically a (floor, ceiling) height map, and there could be no two overlapping rooms one above the other. On the other hand, Quake (1) was an early pioneer [1] of real, actual 3D, including an OpenGL backend and all that. That's o…

> A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D"

Double nitpick: Duke Nukem could actually have stacked floors and bridges over other playable areas.

As such, if it didn’t use “real” 3D, its 2.5D scheme were considerately more elaborate than Doom or Wolfenstein.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#48

Post by dexen »

josteink wrote: post #47
dexen wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Quake and Doom were all about elaborate fake 3d A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D" elaborate fakery of 3D. One of examples of the ruse: a level was basically a (floor, ceiling) height map, and there could be no two overlapping rooms one above the other. On the other hand, Quake (1) was an early pioneer [1] of real, actual 3D, including an OpenGL backend and all that. That's o…

> A nitpick: DooM (1 and 2), just as well as Duke Nukem 3D were indeed "2.5D" Double nitpick: Duke Nukem could actually have stacked floors and bridges over other playable areas. As such, if it didn’t use “real” 3D, its 2.5D scheme were considerately more elaborate than Doom or Wolfenstein.

Thank you a lot, josteink; I mixed up map format's with renderer's limitation.

Re: Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan

#50

Post by sosuke »

deadbunny wrote: post #22
pizza234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very skeptical. This is not just RTT; there's a big amount of rework. Likely, any old game would look significantly better with such development effort (in other words, with any good remastering). This could be considered a great market stunt - the graphical improvement is touted to be due to RTX (ray tracing), while it's actually due to many factors. On top of that, it misleads people into thinking that this typ…

Yeah checking out some of the comparison photos and the textures have definitely received a bump in resolution/quality. Most obvious to me in the quake logo/skull on the left of this[1] image. 1. https://images.nvidia.com/geforce-com/international/comparis...

> Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, models and textures; optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke and particle effects, and much more!
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