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Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

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Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#201

Post by audunw »

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…

Spheres are just a super simple and dead obvious way of showing that your rendering engine is able to do realistic reflections.

In the demo, there are actually lots of much more subtle reflective surfaces that contribute to the realism of the scene.

> .. critical part of the gameplay ..

Strictly speaking, graphics hasn't been a critical part of gameplay for a long time. I think we've mostly gone beyond the point where increasing graphics capabilities actually enable new gameplay.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#202

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #200
shmerl wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adding a new rendering backend to a games engine is a trivial task You keep saying this, but it remains false. If it would have been so trivial, studios wouldn't have hard time adding such backends and wouldn't need to hire third party porting experts when they decide to do it. You can see how long it takes major engines like Unreal to make a fully functional backend (since features added to such engines are public…

And you keep not understanding how game's industry works. Make yourself an IGDA member, attend GDC, go to Independent Games Festival, network with people there and see how many would actually share your opinion.

Facts speak for themselves. Your "how it works" can't argue with reality. It took Unreal more than a year to add Vulkan backend. And the work isn't even fully complete:

https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux

So claim that it's trivial is fallacy. It's surely doable, but it's a substantial effort.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#203

Post by pjmlp »

shmerl wrote: post #202
pjmlp wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you keep not understanding how game's industry works. Make yourself an IGDA member, attend GDC, go to Independent Games Festival, network with people there and see how many would actually share your opinion.

Facts speak for themselves. Your "how it works" can't argue with reality. It took Unreal more than a year to add Vulkan backend. And the work isn't even fully complete: https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux So claim that it's trivial is fallacy. It's surely doable, but it's a substantial effort.

1 - Adding a new rendering backend to a games engine is a trivial task, when compared to the pile of features a game engine needs to support. I did not said it was a trivial task by itself alone.

2 - Check how many in the industry actually care about your 3D API freedom goals. Even Carmack now rather likes DX, in spite of his earlier opinions.

3 - Every big fish and major indie studios are using Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, Xenko, Ogre3D, Cocos2d-X, or whatever else rocks their boat.

If you are happy playing D. Quixote, by all means keep doing it.

Game studios won't change their culture just because of some guys having HN and Reddit 3D API flamewars.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#204

Post by Maken »

mstade wrote: post #123
digi_owl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cities: Skylines is a good example of artistic direction over raw graphic power. It looks nice because its Nordic design architecture and stylish GUI, despite running in a relatively old version of Unity without many bells and whistles.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#205

Post by shmerl »

pjmlp wrote: post #203
shmerl wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facts speak for themselves. Your "how it works" can't argue with reality. It took Unreal more than a year to add Vulkan backend. And the work isn't even fully complete: https://trello.com/c/lzLwtb5P/124-vulkan-for-pc-and-linux So claim that it's trivial is fallacy. It's surely doable, but it's a substantial effort.

1 - Adding a new rendering backend to a games engine is a trivial task, when compared to the pile of features a game engine needs to support . I did not said it was a trivial task by itself alone. 2 - Check how many in the industry actually care about your 3D API freedom goals. Even Carmack now rather likes DX, in spite of his earlier opinions. 3 - Every big fish and major indie studios are using Unreal, Unity, CryEn…

All you said, doesn't change the fact that it's a substantial effort. Whether it's easier than other features is irrelevant to the point above. It's hard overall.

So it's an extra cost for developers who need to spend time on it, and it's exactly the cost MS and other lock-in freaks are benefiting from, since it's increasing the difficulty of releasing cross platform games (one more difficult thing to address). The higher is the difficulty, the more is the likelihood of some games remaining exclusives, which is exactly what lock-in freaks want.

And if you claim that this difficulty is offloaded from most game developers to third party engine developers, it's still a problem. Longer development periods, more bugs, harder support all that contributes to some not making cross platform releases as well.

There are no two ways about it, lock-in is evil, and your justification of it is very fishy (you must be working for one of the lock-in pushers).

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#207

Post by DoveBrown »

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.

There is a value to having competition. My guess that if it works out and Nvidia and AMD have it implemented on silicon, then they will push to have those features accessible through a Vulkan interface.

I love open standards as much as the next guy but for something like this where the utility is still an open question, I'd rather than some just makes an implementation for just their technology. The alternative is that your open standard is full of half baked experiments and trimming a standard is a huge pain.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#208

Post by out_of_protocol »

dingo_bat wrote: post #140
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.

Considering Windows still has ~90% of the market, this is not a trap. It's a matter of practicality.

1) Still a trap

2) DX12 works on win10 only, which deployed to waay less than 90% PCs

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#209

Post by DoveBrown »

shmerl wrote: post #197
pjmlp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to disappoint you, but as developer with Stockholm syndrome that left Linux back for Visual Studio, C++ and .NET. Also former IGDA member and attendee of a few GDC conferences, game developers only care about shipping games and their IP. AAA studios don't care 1 second about APIs to make a better world. Adding a new rendering backend to a games engine is a trivial task, when compared to the pile of features a g…

> Adding a new rendering backend to a games engine is a trivial task You keep saying this, but it remains false. If it would have been so trivial, studios wouldn't have hard time adding such backends and wouldn't need to hire third party porting experts when they decide to do it. You can see how long it takes major engines like Unreal to make a fully functional backend (since features added to such engines are public…

It's trivial in the sense that it's low technical risk. I've not worked in the games for a while. At one company with an inhouse engine the rendering backend was initially DirectX9 written mostly by one person. He then implemented the Xbox360 backend. Another person did the backend for PS3 (OpenGL based). Don't have the exact timings it was ten years ago, but after the initial material, geometry lighting pipeline was done (and that's independent from the backend), the engine guy was never on the critical path.

They added Wii, DirectX10, iOS and Android backends while I was there. None of these were ever considered risky and none had more than one person working on it. Each console/platform has it's own quirks in how to optimise the scene for rendering but the having something rendering on screen is pretty much trivial once you have the machinery in place.

I can't speak for Epic, they are making an engine for every possible game and every possible rendering scene which is a harder problem than what we were doing. But the rendering backend isn't the hard part.

Re: Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing

#210

Post by haldean »

electricslpnsld wrote: post #116
haldean wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I do geometry but I'm not in the gaming field) I'd guess that this is because the fastest way to compute a precise silhouette of an arbitrary shape (like quadratic surfaces) is to do a ray test for every pixel that might hit the surface. You could project the surface onto the image plane to get boundary curves, but (a) determining the curves that make up that silhouette is a complicated geometric process that's pron…

> By the way, modelling everything as an analytic surface rather than as a discretized polygon mesh is called "Boundary Representation" or b-rep I thought that was iso-geometric analysis? What is the difference?

Isogeometric analysis is a means of doing finite element analysis over boundary representation models; FEA is used to physically simulate materials, and usually requires a polyhedral mesh (a mesh where the elements are 3D, instead of the "normal" kind where the elements are 2D polygons). IGA is a way to skip conversion of your b-rep to a mesh while doing that sort of simulation.
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