Futuremark has shared with us some GIFs, showing some of the visual improvements that are coming with real-time raytracing. According to the team, real-time raytracing can render accurate real-time reflections of dynamic objects, can produce reflections of objects that exist outside the main camera view, can produce accurate, perspective-correct reflections on all surfaces in real-time, and they can make other surfaces (than mirrors) look more realistic too.
What’s really cool here, however, is that Futuremark plans to release the first real-time raytracing benchmark test at the end of 2018. Do note that this benchmark test will not be similar to the GDC tech demo that Futuremark showcased. Futuremark will not use the same scene that was present in the GDC tech demo.
As Futuremark told us, its DXR tech demo runs in real-time on current GPU hardware and, because it builds on existing methods, it was relatively easy to implement into its DirectX 12 game engine.
As noted, developers can right now – with DXR – use rasterization for most of the rendering and a smaller amount of raytracing to enhance shadows, reflections, and other effects that are difficult to achieve with traditional techniques.
It will be interesting to see whether developers will use DXR in their engines in order to allow PC gamers to enjoy better visuals in their games. Yes, full ray tracing rendering is still ways off, however, these limited techniques introduced by Futuremark could be very well used in a variety of games, especially since Futuremark claims that they were relatively easy to implement.
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All of this in service of what, though? More arena shooters?
Realism
Realism is only a single aspect of a simulation. If you use amazing technology to just spruce up the exact same experiences, it’s a wasted technology.
I think physics would be another aspect, but we see few games going with the full physics kit these days. One game like Metro will let us shoot out the lights (Like FEAR back in the day), or destroy walls/windows like in BF1.
Big leap in graphics at last..DX12 was pretty meh.
DXR aka Raytracing is created in DX12 and can only run in DX12 API atm(note – Raytracing can be and probably will be implemented in Vulkan or other graphics APIs). Think of DXR like normal mapping, tessellation, ambient occlusion etc, it is a feature built from a graphics API, it is not a new graphics API like say DX13 or Vulkan 2.0.
So basically if anyone is hating on DX12 then you are hating on DXR(which is a exclusive implementation of Raytracing in DX12), so be thankful we have DX12 cause we would not have DXR ?
Or they could just implement it into an API that isn’t so damn restrictive, like lets say… Vulkan or something. I’m going to hate as much on DX12 as I want, no matter how much of a fan you might be or not. The Windows 10 restriction is sh*t and always will be super annoying about it.
The good news is, this stuff is so far away from being viable in games (we’re so far from the average player owning hardware that could run this) that Vulkan can easily catch up.
I am cautiously excited. Looks rather pretty and you can see how every single object in the rendering space gets its own unique light qualities, just like in the real world. Things are no longer rendered as a single chunk and given light treatment as such. Every texture now gets its own reflections, shadows and sub-surface scattering.
hjbsiiuikjmnbsfinfaaoinad Sorry had to wipe drool off the keyboard when I imagined the new Tomb Raider game supporting this 🙂 🙂
ya cant wait!! i guess they can use rasterization for what its good at, and then the lighting, shadows etc, using ray tracing.
Really impressive stuff but realistically speaking when will most of these games begin to use all these techs that have been showcased for many years. I remember seeing an Nvidia tech demo that demonstrated realistic ocean and fluid effects which I haven’t seen any game use till this day. I feel like raytracing may not get utilised all that much in the coming years, even if they made it so simple for developers implement it into their games. But we’ll see.
Yes and no. Water in games began using Tessellation since at least Dirt 2 in 2009 and maybe more noticeably in Crysis 2 in 2011. So the tech has actually been used.
I’ve played Dirt 2 not too long ago and remember the water effects in it. Yeah they definitely aren’t bad. But I was referring to games that use fluid as their primary gimmick. Games like some of the Assassin’s Creed titles and even Sea of Thieves. The SoT devs has certainly put a lot of work into the ocean wave mechanics but I can’t expect too much from it anyway due to its stylistic approach.
I’m sure most games still use some kind of “baked” approach where it’s all just animated and not procedural perse. If that makes any sense.
World of Tanks just got an update today and it has some absolutely mind blowing water physics.
Interesting. Never played that game but I will check out some vids of it. I know for a fact that War Thunder has been improving visually over the years since I first played it though.
Awesome stuff, it will be amazing once this tech will be in all our 3D games. I can’t wait to see what Metro Exodus does with it and the new Tomb Raider.
ME is using full on RT?.
Partial only, we should see a demo of it this week that will explain what features will have an option to use RT.
They just announced like 2 hours ago: “Post-apocalyptic shooter Metro: Exodus will be using Nvidia RTX which possibly hints at a looming Volta release date for the second half of 2018 at the very latest. Metro Exodus developer 4A Games announced that it’s partnering with Nvidia on Nvidia RTX and that a demo featuring ray tracing should be out at GDC 2018.”
I thought it was making 100% use of it. Partial use isn’t really anything mind blowingly amazing tbh.
I also doubt ME will make great use of the new GPU’s, considering that their game has to run on current gen systems, and their previous video interview with IGN had them saying “it will look great on all platforms”, rather than “it will look vastly better on PC”, which entails a form of visual parity in the works.
Nvidia showed off a real time cloth demo of FF a year ago, but we still haven’t seen a game on that exact level as to what they showed us, so that demo is most likely reserved for what consoles will allow next gen, rather than what PC allows for now.
I cannot even begin to get excited about any of this tech, mainly because it’s always put in reserve for another console gen, rather than exclusively for what PC can actually do at the current time.
No one really knows I have heard both stories(100% and partial), the thing is we know what the Dice SW demo was running on so I really doubt they made a separate DXR version of the game when the Dice demo ran on like $15K of comp gear if not more. With Steam at like 50% still on potato 2GB GPUs the industry is sort of screwed(no need to mention the console crew). As an example I made an epic modern 2D game engine for new gear but it is real hard to make sure it scales/works on the potatoes. Just going hard core multi threading will Zerg a quad core for instance, not going to even get into GPU stuff but you have to have solutions to all these problems. Now imagine trying to scale for Raytracing if you design around that feature you simply can’t scale.
I totally get what your saying, just look at what happened to Physx so many of those epic feature are like in no games. The thing is with RT it is a API standard so both AMD and Nvidia support DX so this will ensure both have RT. I think it will be a different story with this tech since it is not like Physx. Main issue is going to be raw GPU power and when we can get those cards and price, not API or support in games.
Well they just tweeted about their Raytracing demo on Twitter @4AGames and said they are 100% showing their RT Metro demo this week so we will see what the deal is. Fingers crossed it owns.