What does Next Gen need to Sell you?
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
Regardless of whether you guys care or not, I'm just gonna rant about it all the same.
It's basically going to be a bigger deal on the developer end of things. If real time RT became the norm, we won't have to do all the weird hacks and kludges. Doing baked lighting really sucks ass. It's like the level is complete, but there was an error or the director wants to make a change - woop we have to rebake all the lights. Basically most 'lights' and 'shadows' aren't actually computed in games, they have been precomputed in a sense and 'rendered' and packaged into the game files. This can take a bloody long time. 3D assets also need a separate UV channel(something made by 'flattening' a 3D object so you can texture it) for this lighting information(which is generally at a lower resolution than the actual textures, but also need to be 'unique' so no repeating textures), which is more work per asset. So basically if we got real time RT, less BS work and more agile development. Something the lighting artists will really appreciate, but as an environment artist I will appreciate having to do one UV channel less, and not having to care about how light map bakes turn out anymore. I can't imagine there being a single 3D artist out there that likes unwrapping lightmaps. Fuck that noise.
Most of the current 'real time raytracing' isn't even the real deal. It's some hybrid solution. Games like Control, Battlefield V, Metro Exodus had only implemented a really early stage hybrid version of it. The new Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition should be a full proper RT experience though. And that is kinda why you need to install a completely different version to the base game, it is indeed something you can't just switch on and off if done proper. So yeah, if the current examples haven't really impressed people... it's because most of it is not even the real deal quite yet. I remember watching the Battlefield V raytracing videos, and I thought it looked ugly as shit - yeah there were more real time reflections but it was either the noise or resolution of the reflections, or they just made surfaces like glass to be uniformly shiny that it just ended up looking more fake than it was with the RT turned off.
I was quite impressed by this though. But it's also kinda cheating. Reflections are one of the things greatly improved by RT, and Star Wars is bling as fuck so no wonder it looks really good.
Not sure if you guys ever played the first FEAR, but that was a game that used a LOT of dynamic lights. Over time a lot of games stopped doing this because of performance issues(weirdly enough, the older game had less polygons and reflections and shit so it could get away with dynamic lights swinging about the place casting dynamic shadows while newer titles can't). This is something that could return once we get to the point where everybody has eventually upgraded past NVidia 30xx cards.
If any of you have played Halo 2 Anniversary, while the new graphics are quite nice - something that really bothered me is just how dark some areas were. There were some outside levels where you had the really bright outdoors, but the caves and shaded areas were just dark as all hell. Real time RT would've fixed that by being able to compute more secondary light bounces, so the dark areas wouldn't be as pitch as they currently are. They could've also probably hacked it with a different settings for their light bakes or with some filters, but eh. Real time RT will also fix this. Overly dark shadows will become a thing of the past.
Fallout 4 is another game I think could benefit, though my example is very narrow. It's just something that kinda peeved me a little - I remember standing in front of shiny ass Codsworth. And while it reflected the environment - it did not reflect me the player or any NPCs or whatever. Which is kinda normal, reflections are expensive so normally there's a fake environment map that's actually being 'reflected'. Which is kinda like a 360 screenshot of the area, normally this is what's getting reflected on most reflective surfaces in most games cause it's cheaper. With real time RT though? I'd be able to see my own ugly face on the chrome body of Codsworth.
I used to work on a racing game, and one of the whackiest hacks we did were building reflections. Basically screenspace reflections were slowing down the game too much, so our hack was actually to put in upside down versions of the above ground assets into the game. Just the really obvious stuff, especially sponsor boards which were bright and vibrant. I hope none of my ex colleagues are here and manage to doxx me. But yeah, extra work into making a sorta weird budget upside down version of the map that you could only see through puddles. That was our 'reflections'. With real time RT though? No need to do such nonsense.
It'll probably trickle down to indie/budget games too. They can afford to have nice lighting with how much less work it becomes.
On bigger studio development side though, I doubt they'll make our lives easier. We'll probably still get paid ass and just get our deadlines become tighter cause oh real time RT means you have to do less.
Anyway, on some level I also kinda don't give a shit? Maybe because I work on games myself, but pushing the graphical boundary all the time has gotten me really jaded. I was immersed in shittier looking games back in the day all the same anyway. Meanwhile, do games actually play that much better? Also production costs increase, sale prices remain the same, there's inflation so money is worth less therefore in theory games are actually selling for even less.... and now we're getting nickled and dimed with shady practices. Granted many of these big companies could just take the hit, the market has increased and total sales have increased... but whatever I digress, I don't actually want to discuss this topic.
I wish I was working on PS1 or PS2 era games instead. Excuse the rant.
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I appreciate the explanation. In your case, if it makes your job easier, totally understandable. Yet the ray-tracing does almost nothing for me and many others, with graphical fidelity already high to begin with. Plus, most AAA games I do not bother with anymore. A majority of the games I play are AA or indie for a good reason. Also, I played FEAR back when it got ported to 360, and I am very familiar with the behind the scenes process.
That's nice and all for people making the games, sure. It's still not a good selling point for ME, the player. I've never given two shits about making sure the game graphics are bleeding edge tech. So when an ad for the platform comes up, and basically says "it looks mostly the same, but with slightly more shiny sparkly bits that you reaaaally can't tell unless you look closely." Well, sorry but that's not going to compel me to fork over $500+ on it. Of the games I've seen that I want to play, not a single one mentioned anything about ray tracing, and I couldn't tell you if they had it or not, and I don't care. That's not why I thought they looked fun, and wanted to purchase them.
I wonder how much better the performance of console games would’ve also been if they went with an Nvidia GPU solution instead, and could’ve implemented dlss 2.0 or whatever follows next, on top of all the more to-the-metal coding. Leads me to think of how games like God of War: Ragnarok and Horizon: Forbidden West would look and play more amazingly with RT.
I completely get this. They honestly did a shit job of selling the tech to people, on top of the first RTX cards being way too pricy. On top of all the crap with card prices and availability due to all the crypto-mining BS. It was already a hard sell to people who cared about bleeding edge graphics, much less people who didn't care so much.
I'm personally still using a GTX 1060.
I think it'll become the norm eventually, but just as a natural progression of things as people start upgrading. Probably won't be anytime soon though.