At GDC 2018, NVIDIA’s Morgan McGuire has shared the company’s short-term and long-term roadmaps for real-time raytracing in video games. Now while we’ve covered the hybrid model in the past, it appears that this is a long-term goal for NVIDIA and not something that most developers are doing right now.
In this co-existence model that some games will support in the coming months (according to McGuire) we’ll have GPU accelerated baking, dynamic probes, dynamic light maps, hard shadows, refraction transparency, mirror reflections and callable shaders.
Naturally, this is a great start but NVIDIA’s long-term roadmap is what most of us are really looking forward to, and that is the true hybrid models. This “Golden Era” will offer area light shadows, ambient occlusion, glossy reflections, rays for data structures, ray traced audio, perfect particle collisions, perfect AI visibility, adaptive supersampling, diffuse interreflection, complex transparency, foveated rendering, beam racing, stochastic motion blur and full path tracing.
Now while we’ve heard that Metro: Exodus will use ray-tracing for its ambient occlusion solution (and perhaps for its glossy reflections), it will most likely be a rayraster co-existence model and not a hybrid model. Unless 4A Games surprises everyone with a true hybrid model, support at least half of these techniques.
According to McGuire, developers should move away from the co-existence model as soon as possible and embrace the hybrid models. With the hybrid models, developers will take all the good stuff from rasterization and put it together with the good stuff from raytracing and end up with an engine that is simpler and faster and easier to understand, and with which artists can work four or five times faster than previous engines.
Those interested can find the complete presentation of NVIDIA’s GDC 2018 raytracing presentation here!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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I can only drool at the idea of a proper Thief, Splinter Cell or new Dishonored that has all this new amazing tech for lightning and shadows.
I want my games to be as technically groundbreaking related to lightning or shadows again as Splinter Cell was in 2002 with SC1 or in 2005 with Chaos Theory. Hell, that applies as well arguably to Thief Deadly Shadows and definitely to Doom 3 and FEAR 1 as well.
Doom 3 was a real game changer when it comes to real time shadows…
Yes and no? Thief Deadly Shadows launched in the same year and has really impressive real time shadows as well.
I’m so hyped for low fps.
Raytracing raytracing, everybody talking about raytracing!
No. Since conslows can’t handle raytracing criminals (games developers) are silent.
Conslows lmao smh.
True doe
tbh, you’ll probably see this stuff on console first.
PS exclusives are already pushing many rendering features more than any PC game is.
Big budget PC exclusives aren’t really a thing, atleast not on the high production value, AAA side.
Star Citizen called, it said to tell you it doesn’t run on conslows 🙁
Maybe on your planet lmao, any idea how much computational power is required to run that? Probably not otherwise you wouldn’t say such smelly bs.
Look at Uncharted 4, now show me a game that does characters as good. They might not have raytracing, but it doesn’t matter because their realtime stuff already looks amazing. Look at Horizon Zero Dawn. They’re over there with volumetric clouds, way before anything on PC.
Look at TLOU 2. No raytracing, but it looks like CGI. The lighting, the animations. God Of War looks amazing too. Days Gone looks quite impressive for open world.
You all act like console games are going to be way behind because they won’t have raytracing. That’s just not true. Console exclusives will continue to be some of the best looking games there are. A lot of that, like I said, comes down to production value, and the fact that they can take advantage of the hardware.
Whereas with PC games, most of them are multiplatform. You might get a raytracing add on for a feature or two, but you aren’t going to see a game built for PC like they are for console exclusives.
That doesn’t mean PC won’t shine. It’ll be great for sure.
Star Citizen is an exception, but it’s got some ways to go. Right now there are still quite a few issues that hold it back in terms of graphics. I do expect it to look gorgeous though, because they aren’t done with graphical features, and their assets are gorgeous.
Any games that look good on consoles, would be 10 times better if made on pc using the entire potential of the platform, besides those games you mentioned are basically super linear, with VERY limited space of interaction, let alone mechanics, so that’s why some portion of them look so good while the rest is subpar or just average, since the average user plays on console and he’s probably someone with no expertise on the matter, the best way to hit on him is to pump up something, in those cases, since there’s a lot of cinematic parts, which is were you can focus on facial animations and on the overall character’s quality, both looks and “acting”, if you check in the rest of the game you probably won’t see the same precision and accuracy you saw on cinematics.
Consoles are limited by design, there’s no way a game on console could be technically superior to one on the PC, unless, like they often do, you gimp the PC version to not make console users feel bad, or you just don’t make the game on PC.
“would be 10 times better if made on pc using the entire potential of the platform”
Ofcourse, but that just doesn’t happen with AAA titles.
“besides those games you mentioned are basically super linear, with VERY limited space of interaction, let alone mechanics, so that’s why some portion of them look so good while the rest is subpar or just average”
Horizon Zero Dawn on PS4 is a full fledged open world, and looks fantastic. Uncharted 4 has so many aspects that beat any game on PC, even games with similar scope.
” the best way to hit on him is to pump up something, in those cases, since there’s a lot of cinematic parts, which is were you can focus on facial animations and on the overall character’s quality, both looks and “acting”, if you check in the rest of the game you probably won’t see the same precision and accuracy you saw on cinematics.”
Character quality is a big deal in character driven third person games. Uncharted 4 and TLOU2 are unmatched (just watch the demo). The quality is great and it’s there when it is needed. They focus on what the player will notice so it’s always great. Cinematics always look better (which is true for most games), but even outside of it, the animations and visuals are amazing.
“Consoles are limited by design, there’s no way a game on console could be technically superior to one on the PC”
Yes, but that doesn’t matter here. Regardless, my point still stands. Going forward, you will see some CGI like graphics from console exclusives on next gen. PC will always be amazing, but it’s not like console games will look crap.
Not saying console games are inferior, but they should be because the additional pretty much every pc has is pretty noticeable, the games they launch are just limited to console capabilities, and we pc gamers just need be content with what the consoles are capable of, does this sound fair to you?
Besides all the games you mentioned are still nothing special in terms of gameplay, they’re still pretty limited and pretty linear. The graphical level can’t make up for everything.
“Not saying console games are inferior, but they should be because the additional pretty much every pc has is pretty noticeable, the games they launch are just limited to console capabilities, and we pc gamers just need be content with what the consoles are capable of, does this sound fair to you? ”
What do you mean ? Multiplatform games have to be designed around consoles. Console exclusives can do what most PC exclusives can’t – benefit from massive budgets and production value. This isn’t anyone’s fault, just a reality, because most PC games don’t make as much money.
“Besides all the games you mentioned are still nothing special in terms of gameplay, they’re still pretty limited and pretty linear. The graphical level can’t make up for everything.
”
Not really. They’re on par with other games in the same genre. HZD is open world, and so is Days Gone. Besides, I’m not talking about gameplay, just graphics.
You’re right but it is someone’s fault.
PC gaming has much much more “culture” behind, although as you said consoles probably make devs earn more money, compared to pc, because most of the people on this planet are casual players, if they were more dedicated and less superficial about videogames, consoles would’ve disappeared by now, there’s literally no pro of getting a console, over a pc, in every way possibile, except maybe initial cost.
We’ll you should talk about gameplay too, because a limited gameplay will result in hardware having much less trouble to compute everything, basically, less stuff to calculate, less hassle for the hardware, which can be used to process something else.
“We’ll you should talk about gameplay too, because a limited gameplay will result in hardware having much less trouble to compute everything, basically, less stuff to calculate, less hassle for the hardware, which can be used to process something else.”
That’s true, but all the games I talked about are on par with other games in the respective genres
Maybe in the respective genres…But just because there isn’t a single big game, aside from like star citizen (if it’ll ever come out), which only comes out on PC, all the games you can compare with are multiplatform, hence limited potential due to consoles.
Well after so many bs is future like mantle, fusion, GCN, DX12 and …… ,real-time ray tracing really is the future!
It really is though. It has always been for many features, but only now do we start seeing GPUs powerful enough to even think about it. And nVidia has a solid background when it comes to GPU Raytracing rendering ( Mental Ray / iRay ) even if those engines are far from realtime ( and aren’t meant for that anyway ).
Still a long way till we see it implemented in most games though…
Yeah maybe the next next generation cards will handle this at acceptable frame rates (60+) at decent resolution.
So Nvidia finally competing with AMD on ray tracing. It has taken them long enough, remember the 290 had ray traced audio.
So where those “ray tracing” games that supposed to run on 290X?
They’ve been busy perfecting their GPU rendering solutions for a couple years now ( Mental Ray and iRay )… With that much experience in the field, they can move to realtime rendering and plan ahead with quite some experience/confidence…
Massive amount of CUDA cores, AI-boosting tensor cores, and “RT cores” are very promising indeed. They are quite confident they are pioneering ground breaking innovations with this new generation so I am quite curious to know more about all of it, its raw power, its architecture…
But we all know we won’t really see it in games before another ( if not two ) generation…
And how did that work out?
uuh, it’s actually AMD that’s decided to compete, not the other way around.
Remember when Nvidia had gpu only for physx ? https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/210c2dcf04b4a7f0fa6bc56ff941f979b0432b42f4b02a972a2b8b1edda0d5fa.jpg
No. But I do remember they brought the tech to integrate into their cards though.
I just want metro exodus to be optimized game.
Well, they’ve never really made a game that ran great in the past. They’re also shoveling in Nvidia specific software…
So the odds that those two things go together and come out running like butter is pretty small.
DEMANDING ? UNOPTIMIZED, noob -_-
Yeah maybe the next next generation cards will handle this at acceptable frame rates (60+) at decent resolution.
Eh, probably not. What new tech lands and runs well of the gate?
AO, Tesselation, Raytracing, it all takes a couple generations to get fully integrated into the cards, much less the games.
nah i think even the likes of 2060 probably have the grunt to run games like metro exodus with all the ray tracing effect being enabled.
I’m glad you’re able to make that deduction with zero evidence on performance, all while ignoring the history of every new graphical feature launch ever…
If the upcoming 20 series is simply based on volta yeah i would imagine the situation will be the same how it goes with tessellation. Still remember the Samaritan demo which took 3 GTX580 to run? Then nvidia run the same demo using a single GTX680 only. The trick was replacing MSAA with FXAA. now in the Siggraph presentation the Star Wars GDC demo that took 4 Titan V to run now can be one on a single RTX8000. With Turing the key point is hybrid rendering (raster, ray trace, compute AI). This is a new approach in developing games. No game developer will develop their games with full ray trace effect in mind. Even metro exodus the ray tracing will be limited to certain effect only. With Turing improvement in ray tracing it might not that hard to run ray trace effect in games like metro exodus with good performance. The more taxing part most likely things that has nothing to do with ray trace such as heavy tessellation or advance PhysX effect (which has been used extensively in previous installment)
All I really ask for is better textures, proper resolution, AA and high framerate support.
Anything extra is nice, but it’s hard to expect devs to spend more money on PC, which is generally a smaller segment. Still, anything additional that I can turn on/off like you mentioned is great.