Ray Tracing

Namaskaram all,

I was just wondering if GGG will be adding Ray Tracing Technology in the future to POE?

It is still pretty recent, the RTX 2080 and 2080ti just came out, but i was wondering if this is in your plan of work at some point?

Thank you all
Awaklin

Game engine is really inefficient atm...taking on raytracing LOL

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Upgraded the water graphics, now water uses Ray Tracing!

Scary... but is the future.

You know nvidia's marketing is on top of it when kids wants raytracing on everything.

Just think about your life, how many more years of your life can you go without raytracing?

And according to Anandtech, you should just buy it...


It's kinda funny tho it reminded me of "blast processing" of my time.

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Jojenmaihem wrote:

"

Upgraded the water graphics, now water uses Ray Tracing!

Scary... but is the future.

In the year 3094...PoE finally was stable.

Everything changed after Raytracing attacked...

Ray tracing? Isn't that decades old technology that just didn't break through because the graphics card manufacturers refused to support it?

"

Awaklin wrote:

Namaskaram all,

I was just wondering if GGG will be adding Ray Tracing Technology in the future to POE?

It is still pretty recent, the RTX 2080 and 2080ti just came out, but i was wondering if this is in your plan of work at some point?

Thank you all
Awaklin

I am pretty sure GGG will implement this technology sooner or later. But it will take some time as this game is focusing on rather rich playerbase, but it isnt technology that sells this game.

Raytracing is future no doubt.

"

Mythabril wrote:

Ray tracing? Isn't that decades old technology that just didn't break through because the graphics card manufacturers refused to support it?

It is actually an old technology that was sidelined not because it wasn´t supported, but because no gaming graphics card could actually run it due to the sheer amount of processing power required.

Lots of non-gaming graphics cards can already do this, although not in the way that Nvidia released the RTX´s.

It is mainly used by companies, you see it mostly in CGI, Animated movies, etc...

But now it has become available to us all, so it would be nice if they implemented it, that´s all.

Of course you would have to give the choice to disable it, because it would mainly be able to run on high end computers and with the new RTX cards.

Cheers
:)

"

Mythabril wrote:

Ray tracing? Isn't that decades old technology that just didn't break through because the graphics card manufacturers refused to support it?

What? It's not because they refused to support it (in fact there is another class of very expensive rendering graphics cards being sold along side gaming cards just for ray tracing for things like movies), it's because cards simply weren't powerful enough to do it in real time and we didn't have a way to filter low samples in a reasonable time as well. Ray tracing tries to recreate how light actually works by casting out rays (meant to simulate photons) and having them bounce around before hitting your eye(the camera). Or in this case, it's kinda done in reverse where the rays are cast out from the camera and computations are done to project what light sources those rays were from and where they bounced. The sharper you want the image to be, the more rays you need to cast out. The less rays you have the noisier the image is as there's not enough to fill the view. Now the latest RTX GPUs are utilizing technology from microsoft that allows using an algorithm to denoise a very low number of rays to make the raytraced elements smoother, this on top of a dedicated portion of the GPU specifically for that task. Note that even with the low ray count and dedicated ray tracing hardware that makes the cards more expensive, ray tracing still takes a huge toll on performance. This is why the current games that previewed ray tracing could only run at 60fps AT BEST at 1080p on the highest end RTX card. Hell, the latest Tomb Raider seemed to run at only 40FPS at 1080p on the 2080ti with ray traced shadows. Also note that each of the games showcased only had one element ray traced each, NOT the entire scene. Be it global illumination, shadows, or reflections; doing anything beyond a single ray traced element on top of rasterized graphics is just too much to currently handle. Thus we have rather unimpressive looking ray tracing that's actually very impressive to see in real time if you've done any pre-rendered 3D animation work.

tl;dr Ray tracing is horribly expensive in terms of rendering and the only reason we're starting to see it in real time now is due to a combination of advancing hardware and some serious filtering of low samples.

"

Mythabril wrote:

Ray tracing? Isn't that decades old technology that just didn't break through because the graphics card manufacturers refused to support it?

And with good reason. Ray tracing is incredibly complex compared to rasterization. The first consumer "3D accelerators" in the 1990s were only capable of rasterizing textured triangles. You fed the corner coordinates (which had to already be in screen space) into a bunch of registers on the card and it generated the pixels directly into the frame buffer. This is a very simple process which can be done one triangle at the time and requires practically no intermediate storage from the card.

Ray tracing is a whole different beast. In order to trace the ray through multiple reflections in the scene, the coordinates of all triangles must be made available to the ray tracer. A complex scene can contain over a million triangles, so the storage requirement is significant. And processing so many triangles requires some sort of spatial data structure as well, requiring even more storage and additional logic. It speaks volumes that Nvidia has spent 10 years perfecting their hardware.

During the advent of computer 3D graphics there were some graphics workstations where the graphics subsystem was able to keep the entire scene in memory. Those could conceivably have don ray tracing as well. They were very expensive machines though, costing as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars. They fell into obsolescence as the simpler type of accelerator hardware was easier to develop further.

As for ray tracing in PoE, I wonder how y'all imagine it would affect the game? The world of Wraeclast does not have a lot of reflective surfaces, which is where ray tracing has the biggest impact. A few areas have various puddles, but that sort of mostly planar reflections are easily implemented with traditional techniques. I suppose it might be of some help with lighting, though I'm uncertain how much of a difference it would make compared to GGG's new light tech. One thing it definitely wouldn't affect is the level of detail in models and textures.