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Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

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Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#121

Post by pjackson5 »

bhouston wrote: post #7

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 spend a lot of time doing lighting TD work using non-realtime renderers. Every one of those examples is pretty good for realtime, but also looks soooo wrong! its not anywhere near the same quality as a proper raytracer!

-Thats not what an ao pass should look like. But you shouldnt even need ao if your GI/shadows look good

- Gi should have detail to it, every realtime example is sooooo blurry

-The screen space reflections sometimeslook ok but really depends on your scene, you get all sorts of reflections in the wrong place.

-Yucky DOF without the nice bokeh on highlights and all those edge problems you get with a z-space blur.

The beauty of raytracing with a unified sampler is it makes the algorithm for each of these features you listed incredibly simple and it mixes distributes CPU/GPU time to whats important depending on that part of the image.

scene with lots of motion blur- more primary samples, less samples to gi/shadows/reflections - automatically based on how much gi/shadows you see

scene with lots of gi - more samples in gi, less for reflections etc - automatically

You can have a complex scene with reflections/gi everywhere, and then turn a heavy DOF on and get faster frame times.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#122

Post by justinhj »

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?

They have learned that in other areas of their business that using and contributing to FOSS is a win for everybody.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#123

Post by mstade »

digi_owl wrote: post #18
bhouston wrote: post #7

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 really wish i kept a bookmark for an article over at filfre.net, because in it a game dev, from back around the C64 era i believe, lamented how whenever there was a big step up in hardware performance, game developers had a bad habit of getting stuck trying to show how far they could push the hardware while ignoring game mechanics and similar. Effectively whenever some new piece of hardware hit the market, the qual…

On the one hand I agree with you, but in the other there’s Horizon Zero Dawn, Battlefield 1, Tomb Raider, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, NHL 17 and 18, Journey, the Little Big Planet series, Cities: Skylines, GTA V...

I dunno, I think gaming is starting to come out of that prolonged oooh-look-shiny-effects kind of era and into a pretty creative space.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#125

Post by AMDGfxManager »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #124
AareyBaba wrote: post #44

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.

Can you elaborate: what are you testing and comparing to ? are you looking at a real-time application (gaming) or is your comment about offline rendering (visualeffects/animation) ? I don't work on this project but I can forward the feedback to the developers.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#126

Post by blt »

dahart wrote: post #119
bhouston wrote: post #7

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…

> a lot of this is already possible in the current renderers at a reduced cost. Maybe this misses the point of standardizing an API? Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others? I'm sure a lot of studios would welcome faster dev times, fewer authoring tools, and fewer geometric limits for their rendering effects. Als…

> Isn't there considerable value in having a simple framework that can achieve all those effects, and be shared and communicated easily with others?

historically, gfx apis went the opposite direction. fixed function pipeline was replaced by shaders. now we rely on the api basically to do rasterization and little else. i think in ray tracing you would want a similar distillation. so like yes, the ray cast operator might be wanted in the api, but i think computations like importance sampling from the conditional brdf are better left in shaders.

and beginners who just want to get triangles on the screen copy/paste a bunch of code they dont fully understand, like now :)

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#127

Post by naikrovek »

oneplane wrote: post #110

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.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#128

Post by whatshisface »

electricslpnsld wrote: post #117
milesvp wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that rasterization really made portal hard to make. They had to jump through a bunch of hoops to make it all work. Meanwhile I understand that adding portals to raytrace quake was like an afternoon's exercise. I'm also annoyed that there's a map in overwatch where the corner mirrors don't actually reflect anything :P I think generally with many of the tricks that have come out of SIGGRAPH for the…

> 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.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#129

Post by justAnotherNET »

Tobba_ wrote: post #105
Aardwolf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 NU…

The crysis 2 myth was from a video game “journalist” using debut mode which forced tesselation always and to the highest quality.

It’s a myth

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#130

Post by phkahler »

virtualritz wrote: post #113
Tobba_ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 NU…

> 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. That's simply not true. I started getting into (high end) 3D in the early 90's. I've probably used every NURB or higher order surface modeling tool under the sun since then. In fact, there are many amazing modeling tools for working with…

>> the surface of the patch is equal to the limit surface that would be obtained by the subdivision scheme.

That's not true if any of the vertices is extraordinary. In other words a vertex shared by more or less than 4 quads. The good news is that subdividing those quads each into 4 smaller ones will result in 3/4 of the surface area meeting the right criteria. Or the area hard to deal with becomes 1/4 the size.

The ultimate coolness of subdivision surfaces is that every vertex on a subdivided mesh is a leaner combination of the original vertices. The weights do not change during animation. The weights only change if the topology does. Another nice thing is that meshes at different LOD contain the vertices of the lower LOD mesh.

They really do everything with one exception - they can't exactly represent quadric surfaces which are so important in CAD tools.

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