Author Topic: Rays light up life-like graphics!  (Read 6562 times)

Offline Xessive

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Rays light up life-like graphics!
« on: Sunday, March 18, 2007, 01:12:17 PM »
Rays light up life-like graphics!

Quote
At the tech-fair Cebit, a team from the university demonstrated a lighting technique, known as ray-tracing, using relatively low-powered processors.

Before now, many powerful computers were needed to generate the life-like images this technique can produce.

But the scientists have shown they can achieve the effect using custom-made chips or a high-end PC graphics card.

Graphics in computer games are typically rendered via a technique known as rasterisation which involves drawing all the elements of a scene using polygons.

The holy grail for game makers is to use ray-tracing to depict scenes far more realistically because it models the way rays of light bounce around a scene and are reflected off objects.

Pretty interesting stuff.

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #1 on: Sunday, March 18, 2007, 01:15:18 PM »
Sounds like it takes some strain off the processor.
That's good.

Though, is it putting more strain on the vid card?

Offline Xessive

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #2 on: Sunday, March 18, 2007, 01:17:17 PM »
Sounds like it takes some strain off the processor.
That's good.

Though, is it putting more strain on the vid card?

Yeah, that's the direction a lot of developers (especially vid card developers) have been heading.

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #3 on: Sunday, March 18, 2007, 01:21:27 PM »
Yeah, that's the direction a lot of developers (especially vid card developers) have been heading.

Fine by me. That's the point of the vid card, anyways -- to take the strain off the processor, for the most part.

Anyone got any clue how their modified version of any game they tried w/ their technique run compared to the developer's version of the game?

For example, I wonder how a "Ray-modified" Quake 4 runs when compared to Id's unmodified Quake 4.

It's be interesting to see the benchmarks b/t the two....

Offline idolminds

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #4 on: Sunday, March 18, 2007, 01:54:10 PM »
See more here.

The problem is performance. On a Intel quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700, they were getting 17fps at a resolution of 256x256. But the more cores, the fast it can go. And eventually they want a dedicated ray tracing graphics card (or at least have regular cards support ray tracing acceleration).

Offline Cobra951

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #5 on: Sunday, March 18, 2007, 05:45:27 PM »
I don't see how real-time raytracing would replace polygon-modeled solids.  It would be a nice addition to the rendering process.

Offline Xessive

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #6 on: Monday, March 19, 2007, 05:29:05 AM »
I don't see how real-time raytracing would replace polygon-modeled solids.  It would be a nice addition to the rendering process.
Yeah, I think some kind of hybrid technique would work out pretty nicely.

Offline scottws

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #7 on: Monday, March 19, 2007, 06:39:35 AM »
Ray-tracing.... isn't that the type of rendering engine DOOM used?

Offline idolminds

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #8 on: Monday, March 19, 2007, 08:14:25 AM »
That would be ray-casting.

Offline Cobra951

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #9 on: Monday, March 19, 2007, 09:17:04 AM »
Right.  Common confusion.

Quote
Ray casting is not a synonym for ray tracing, but can be thought of as an abridged, and significantly faster, version of the ray tracing algorithm. Both are image order algorithms used in computer graphics to render three dimensional scenes to two dimensional screens by following rays of light from the eye of the observer to a light source. Ray casting does not compute the new tangents a ray of light might take after intersecting a surface on its way from the eye to the source of light. This eliminates the possibility of accurately rendering reflections, refractions, or the natural fall off of shadows -- however all of these elements can be faked to a degree, by creative use of texture maps or other methods. The high speed of calculation made ray casting a handy method for the rendering in early real-time 3D video games.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #10 on: Wednesday, September 19, 2018, 04:49:33 PM »
Ray-tracing is supposed to be supported by Microsoft in the next Windows 10 update for DX12's new DXR suite (DX Ray-Tracing, which is coming next month) and first in the Nvidia RTX 2080 regular & Ti cards ($700-1400) - but none of this stuff is supported yet and not even out there yet.



Offline Cobra951

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #11 on: Wednesday, September 19, 2018, 10:18:58 PM »
Wow.  Historical thread, revived.  That's pretty much what came to fruition now, with Nvidia RTX.  1st gen of the new tech, though.  That always sucks (baby's first steps), and gets a smattering of support at first.  Plus to my knowledge, AMD isn't following suit, and they own the console space.  Games as a whole need to support the lowest (and most popular) common denominator.  Given that the 2080ti is otherwise a mere 30% faster than the 1080ti, at a 70% higher price, I don't see a need for the new cards for a year or two, when perhaps their expensive innards will somehow matter in the real world.

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #12 on: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 03:52:48 AM »
AMD will have Ray-Tracing, but we don't know what cards will support it yet:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time-ray-tracing-for-prorender-and-radeon-gpu-profiler-12

Microsoft has to add DXR Suite (DX Ray-Tracing) to their DX12 graphics API (which is Windows 10 only). Supposedly, Microsoft wants DXR to be a big deal on W10 and their next consoles.

Supposedly, DXR is coming in the next Windows 10 Fall Update - https://www.pcgamer.com/ray-tracing-benchmark-built-from-the-ground-up-is-headed-to-3dmark-this-fall/

Metro Exodus, BF5, and SottR will support it.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider will support it, in a future update of theirs too.

SotTR with DXR/DX12 on Nvidia RTX:


Metro Exodus w/ Ray-tracing Nvidia RTX:

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #13 on: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 04:04:32 AM »
Linus Tech Tips on RTX 2080 regular and Ti:


Offline Cobra951

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #14 on: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 06:15:58 AM »
The best part of Linus's video. 

Watch the Gamers Nexus reviews of the 2080 and 2080ti.  Steve goes much more in depth in analyzing the performance compared to what matters today--current games.  He also compares like for like in cooler design: 2-fan-cooled FE 20-series cards vs 2-fan-cooled 10-series partner cards.  The blower-style one-fan cooler in the 10-series FE cards is terrible, and skews the possible performance increases of the new cards.  He more recently had a 4-hour (!) stream on overclocking, which I've yet to skim through (and that's all I intend to do with that massive timesink).

There are several other videos, like Paul's and Bitwit's.  The consensus so far is that these cards are absolutely not worth the money today.  Too much left to be proved.  Personally, I doubt this tech is ever going to satisfy in its first generation.  It needs time to cook to be sure one way or the other, which is why I said I'll look at these again in a year or two.  Let's make sure all that extra expensive new tech doesn't turn out to be a feature few if anyone spends quality time supporting in games, and that even then, it comes at too great a cost in performance.

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #15 on: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 03:26:34 PM »
I think RTX needs to cook for a few years and/or generations first - i.e. it needs to be out from Microsoft w/ DXR suite for DX12, dev's need to get on board w/ this, and NVidia needs to get RTX (Ray-Tracing) drivers out. We also need to the see performance on the pricey 2080 reg. and 2080 Ti.

And maybe wait a few gen's for 21xx, 22xx, or 23xx to see if RTX is finally performing and looking out-standing. For me, I'd want probably at least 60fps w/ RTX at Medium or above. I would prefer framerates in the 70-120fps range, TBH - I can blame G-Sync and high refresh rates spoiling me.

For those w/ 970's and above; or 1060's or above - meh, looks like we should wait. No surprise. You normally should wait a few generations to upgrade GPU's anyways.

For those probably w/ 700 series or lower - an upgrade might be in order, to either 1060 or above; or mid-range 2000 series (when they come, the 2060) or above.


« Last Edit: Thursday, September 20, 2018, 03:47:29 PM by MysterD »

Offline Xessive

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #16 on: Sunday, September 23, 2018, 09:29:35 AM »
I expect that Asus and other manufacturers will make alternate versions with the single-blower (blowing outward) instead of two upward-facing fans.

There's a lot to look forward to with raytracing (which our discussion from 2007 illustrates), but I agree with MyD there's still a few years before we see some meaningful usage and implementation.

Offline Cobra951

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #17 on: Tuesday, September 25, 2018, 06:36:27 AM »
Yeah, I think we're all in agreement on that.  The tech is unproven and unsupported.  When it does get support, it's only going to apply to a small percentage of the overall gaming market.  RTX even with Nvidia users alone is going to account only for the very top end of users who didn't balk at the prices.  Then there's AMD, who is notably silent on ray tracing and Navi, and who knows what they're up to.  The best way to stick it to Nvidia, other than let them hang themselves with their own bad marketing, is to ignore RTX completely.  Let Nvidia roll that ball up the hill by themselves if they can.  AMD still have the big-2 console makers in addition to their paltry, but perhaps about to grow, PC-market share.

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #18 on: Tuesday, September 25, 2018, 05:02:18 PM »
DICE is supporting AMD for Battlefield 5 with Ray-Tracing w/ Ryzen and AMD GPU's:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-battlefield-5-hardware


Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #19 on: Friday, April 12, 2019, 03:50:49 AM »
NVidia releases Ray-Tracing support to their 10xx & 16xx series w/ their latest 425.31 drivers:
https://www.pcgamer.com/you-can-now-enable-ray-tracing-on-gtx-cards-but-performance-is-low/

Though, performance is low on them.

Offline Cobra951

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #20 on: Friday, April 12, 2019, 07:22:49 AM »
I have a feeling that low performance is exactly the point.  Look how pretty; but for acceptable performance, spend megabucks, Pascal holdouts.  Plus maybe fewer developers will balk at implementing RTX features if they're supported back through Pascal.  Nvidia is prodding us along.

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #21 on: Friday, April 12, 2019, 09:21:14 AM »
@Cobra:
Agreed. I think they are fishing, trying to get lower 10xx series owners to see how pretty RTX is, to try to get them to upgrade to the higher-end RTX 20xx series.

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #22 on: Sunday, April 14, 2019, 07:50:46 AM »
Eurogamer & Digital Foundry - A look at RTX performance now on older GTX cards & current RTX cards:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-real-time-ray-tracing-tested-on-gtx-pascal-hardware

Digital Foundry - Video of them testing RTX on GTX 10xx & 16xx cards and RTX 20xx cards:

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #23 on: Monday, May 27, 2019, 04:23:32 PM »
NVidia on YouTube - Remaster 1997's Quake II with RTX (Ray-Tracing), which is coming to Steam in June:


[/youtube]

Offline Cobra951

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #24 on: Tuesday, May 28, 2019, 08:04:19 AM »
Quake 2 is the perfect showcase at this stage of the tech.  Very low polygon count, so it allows more per-poly processing, for great-looking results that don't hammer performance. 

Someone posted that they couldn't run Q2 in 1997, and they still can't run it.  LOL!  That's me too.  I remember Q1 and Q2 chugging on 486DX hardware.  I'm sure the path-traced Q2 will run like crap on my 1060, if it runs at all.  (I still have old drivers.  I'm chicken about fixing what isn't broken.)

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #25 on: Tuesday, May 28, 2019, 02:51:55 PM »
Quake 2 is the perfect showcase at this stage of the tech.  Very low polygon count, so it allows more per-poly processing, for great-looking results that don't hammer performance. 

Someone posted that they couldn't run Q2 in 1997, and they still can't run it.  LOL!  That's me too.  I remember Q1 and Q2 chugging on 486DX hardware.  I'm sure the path-traced Q2 will run like crap on my 1060, if it runs at all.  (I still have old drivers.  I'm chicken about fixing what isn't broken.)

Quake 1+2 run great, if you use a source port.

You should be able to do 1080p60fps easy with:

Quake 1 - use DarkPlaces Source Port:

README Stuff - https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/readme.html
Downloads section - http://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/download.html

Quake 2 - use KMQuake2 Source Port:
Info Stuff and Main Page - http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/
Downloads section - http://www.markshan.com/knightmare/downloads.htm

Sure, there are other Source Ports and whatnot, but those are the ones I know and have used.

Another Source Port for Q2, which I haven't tried yet, is Yamagi. People seem to like that one.
Yamagi Quake 2 AKA YQuake 2 - https://github.com/yquake2/yquake2/pull/181

EDIT:
I have a GTX 1060 6GB (mobile version) on my laptop. I'll probably throw Q2 RTX at it (as I did do the RTX update), but I don't expect the moon from it.

Would be great if it hits 1080p60fps.

The 20xx series have extra cores just for RTX stuff, so...
I do expect the 1060 will get hammered performance-wise (compared to 20xx cards) b/c 10xx cards don't have their own special cores straight-up dedicated to just the RTX stuff.

« Last Edit: Tuesday, May 28, 2019, 03:28:24 PM by MysterD »

Offline gpw11

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #26 on: Wednesday, June 12, 2019, 11:56:26 PM »
I was kind of thinking about buying one of the RTX cards for some reason.  I have a 6GB 1060 and I don't even play new games that often at all but I just kind of wanted to check out the ray tracing because it's a technology I've been hearing about since I pretty much got into gaming as being this holy grail that we were always so far away from.   Plus, I've always bought consoles/cards far behind the curve and thought it might be cool to be out in front.

But looking at all the demos and everything Quake is by far the only thing I'd actually want to play and I feel like the only game where it would have this big impact for someone like me who maybe doesn't pick up on a lot of technical details of lighting in games but just "Oh, that looks great" or "That doesn't look so great".

So I'll hold off.  It kind of reminds me of the Geforce 3 cards and bump mapping. It was in a few games in a primitive fashion and you could stop and stare at a wall and be like "fuck, this looks awesome" but get into actual gameplay and it didn't make nearly as big of a deal as like trilinear filtering (remember old games filtering the textures like ten feet in front of your character as you ran along)?

And I mean, obviously, once everything was capable of vertex shading and bump mapping graphics got great - but it was like 6 years between Halo and the glossy Xbox 360 games where everything actually did it "well". Raytracing seems to be the same thing.

And that's kind of cool. I remember thinking a few years ago how when I first got into gaming it was exciting because of technology like that (and ragdoll physics) would come out and you'd be like "rad!" and then it would slowly proliferate until it was in everything and you stopped appreciating it. And it feels like we haven't had any real advancements like that for the last decade or so (and I'm sure we have but they're nuanced enough that I haven't noticed).  It's kind of cool to witness it happen again.

I just decided I don't want to be on the forefront of it.

Offline Cobra951

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #27 on: Thursday, June 13, 2019, 05:34:00 AM »
I think you pretty much worked it all out for yourself.  Yes, the prospect of real-time ray tracing is exciting.  No, the tech isn't mature enough yet.  I remember the first days of bump mapping too.  It hammered performance so much that I'd turn it off.  Now it's no big trick.  I think we'll get there too with RT--maybe, because Moore's law seems to be fizzling out.  If you have the better part of a grand burning a hole in your pocket, sure; go for it.  Otherwise, I'd wait another hardware generation or two, see whether it can do the job well enough to warrant the expense, or whether it gets cheap enough to buy a new card even if RT is still mostly pie in the sky.

I have a 6GB 1060 too.  I have not felt motivated to upgrade.  If anything, I wish it had a beefier CPU feeding it than a 4-core, 4-thread i5-6500.  Upgrading that means upgrading the motherboard; and if that has to happen, I may as well get a case and PSU too--new computer.  Not happening, because there's no need yet.  Everything works well enough or better.

You should be able to run that Quake demo with your card, if at a crappy frame rate.  The latest drivers support RTX in software on Pascal cards down to the 1060.  I haven't bothered.  Haven't even updated drivers in a long while.

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #28 on: Friday, June 14, 2019, 03:10:00 PM »
Quake 2 RTX runs horrible on my gaming SC15 laptop w/ 6GB 1060, i7 7700HQ, 16 GB RAM, W10 x64. Slideshow, at like 6-10fps at any 1080p. 720p is crap too, around 10-15fps.

I needed to go to 800x600 with like 70% resolution downgrade (ewwwwwwww!) to get it around 30fps.

RTX Lighting is gorgeous and amazing - but it ain't worth it....yet.

Also, Q2 RTX doesn't seem to support music files for Quake 2 currently/yet. Many other source ports do...and many of the source ports run a lot better (since those ain't using RTX); you're better off w/ those Source Ports like Yamagi, for now.

10xx series have NO cores to handle RTX, while 20xx series does have cores built to handle just the RTX stuff.

EDIT:
I think Cobra's on the money about waiting a few generations, for them to improve & perfect RTX performance. RTX is beautiful and the lighting makes A TON of difference, even on old games like Q2 - but it ain't optimized at all yet; and it's gonna cost good $ to buy a current RTX 20xx series card (or even SLI RTX cards) that might run RTX at maybe 30-60fps at some setting...

EDIT 2 - 6/17/2019:
Worth noting: turning off Global Illumination on Quake 2 RTX can really improve its performance, some 10-30fps.

I have Xbox for PC Game Pass, since it was $1 during E3 for a month subscription, and have been playing Metro: Exodus. This game supports RTX, if you want to use it - but since I have a 1060 6GB, expect performance to be in the 10-20fps w/ it on...if you have that card. Looks amazing, but runs like crap w/ that stuff on. Better off with it off, as at 1080p at Ultra, as I can do much better, w/ 70-110fps. At Extreme, we're talking about 40-70fps here.
« Last Edit: Monday, June 17, 2019, 04:03:00 AM by MysterD »

Offline MysterD

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Re: Rays light up life-like graphics!
« Reply #29 on: Wednesday, July 17, 2019, 03:39:35 PM »
VG 247 on NVidia's new DLSS Technology (Deep Learning Super-Sampling):
https://www.vg247.com/2019/07/16/dlss-nvidia-rtx-deep-learning-super-sampling-pc-performance-graphics/

- This technique is found in NVidia's RTX cards only currently
- It's another Super-sampling technique, in which you take an image at a higher-res (for example at 4K) and crush it down to a lower one (such as 1080p), which will give you better image quality when it gets rendered back to the lower resolution.
i.e. You start at 4K processing, output it down to 1080p, but it still looks better than 1080p but worse than 4K (2160p).
- NVidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling) is similar to AMD's new "image sharpening" technique in their newest line of cards
- Basically, NVidia uses AI (found in Tensor cores in RTX) to improve performance greatly...
- ...But you lose some quality in the image here.
- This DLSS can be important when mixed w/ RTX (Ray-Tracing), as performance in RTX sucks right now.
- DLSS can improve performance quite a bit (up to 50% as this is the case w/ Monster Hunter World, but this can depend on the game).