/games/ - Games

Easy lmao. People who say you can't see the difference are coping about their ancient GPUs still being relevant.
>t. Professional Ray Tracer

>>40858
Left
>>40859
Right
>>40860
Left
>>40861
Left
>>40862
Left
>>40863
Right
>>40864
Left
>>40865
Left

>>40874
hey, thank you for accepting the challenge!!!!!! it's all correct!!!! I see we have a fellow computer graphics worker here :3

I've seen a lot of people whining about ray tracing without even knowing what it does. I think plenty of people don't see the difference because they don't touch grass, so they don't remember how lighting looks in real life or something, it's my only explanation.

are you a CG artist, a programmer or both?

>>40858
Looks good. I really need to upgrade from my 1070

>>40877
>are you a CG artist, a programmer or both?
Just because people here aren't CG artists doesn't mean they can't make a difference. I can because most non-RTX lighting engines other than Hedgehog Engine don't have light coloring nearby objects.

thanks for the thread OP

>>40877
>are you a CG artist, a programmer or both?
Programmer, and you? The reflections are the bigger tell, but global illumination is pretty obvious when it lightens the scene like >>40885 points out. Not sure if it would be feasible to bake for an open world with dynamic time of day, but it's probably possible with the massive 100+ GBs games take up these days. Personally I think realtime GI isn't ready for consumer hardware. It's getting less noisy, but temporal effects look bad with how slowly lighting updates imo. The next retro artstyle (replacing pixelshart and haunted PSX) could be realtime whitted raytracing, A E S T H E T I C bryce3d looking stuff.

>>40888
>Not sure if it would be feasible to bake for an open world with dynamic time of day, but it's probably possible with the massive 100+ GBs games take up these days.
That's how games like GTA do it. If you notice they don't smoothly progress time of day. Are you a CG artist? What kind?

>>40889
>That's how games like GTA do it.
I mean before these raytracing updates. They still had/have lightmaps for the outdoors with the day/night cycle without raytracing.

>>40889
>>40890
So obviously the reflections are the biggest difference, but why it looks better than the baked raytracing, probably the realtime raytracing ends up more detailed, since it's only working on one area, and like you said, huge map+multiple times of day and night means it's going to take up a huge amount of gigs.

>>40888
Thanks for reminding me that bryce3D exists, I wanted to get into it a long time ago because I love the A E S T H E T I C S but I forgor

>>40874
>posting like if you are smart
lmfao its absolutely obvious for any normal human being with eyes
eat shit and fucking die, youre not clever, youre retarded

>>40877
You don't have to work in those fields to be able to see the difference.
Show these images to anyone who works with lights in general, be it in film, photography, or even architecture and they'd be able to tell the difference.

>>40891
>So obviously the reflections are the biggest difference
Honestly, I think people overstate how much reflections matter. Not saying it doesn't, but taking away the RTGI bounce lighting is way more impactful, especially in shots like >>40859 and>>40862

>>41765
Look at the difference in the windows in that picture.
>>40859

Any of these images with glass, the biggest difference is the reflection. >>40860
Reflections create like a whole new dimension, a mirror world. That's why they cover the walls in mirrors at the gym and restaurants, because it makes the space look so much bigger.

>>41767
I get what you're saying, but I feel like it's way easier to "autocomplete" a mirror's reflection in your head compared to having accurate bounce lighting and to a lesser extent, having more grounded shadows and accurate RTAO to more ground objects to a scene.

Like, looking at that scene you linked, had you taken out the reflections entirely, but keep everything else, I would sooner assume the window being opaque rather than the image being less "real", compared to if you take everything else but the reflection away.

Well, what DOES it do? Clearly the pictures look different from each other, but what IS the difference? More fidelity? When I hear the raytracing buzzword I immediately look for reflections, I know it's more than this.

Graphics are for the bourgeois.

>>41953
I'm glad you asked!!!

In short: ray tracing is kind of a brute-force way of simulating light by sending millions (on average) of light rays in the scene for every frame. It's still not ideal, because it's not a unified system for all kinds of light interactions. Path tracing on the other hand is very scientifically accurate, and virtually indistinguishable from how light works in real life to the human eye – it's a unified system and it's obscenely brute forcey because it checks for a lot more information for each ray. It's literally the most advanced light simulation technique there is for simulating visible lighting phenomena (as opposed to quantum lighting phenomena and other shit you can't even see).

And it's not a buzzword okay >:C
It's tremendously impressive that it's even possible in real time, because ray tracing and path tracing were exclusively used in movies, taking hours for render farms to render each ray traced or path traced frame.

Without ray tracing, games have been using cheap tricks to poorly approximate how lighting looks like in real life, but they all break easily (even if you use "baked" lighting, which is labor intensive and has many issues, although it can produce great results). And many common lighting phenomena are fundamentally impossible to showcase without ray tracing or path tracing (caustics, light dispersion, recursive reflections and so forth).

>>41953
>Without ray tracing, games have been using cheap tricks to poorly approximate how lighting looks like in real life, but they all break easily.
I wouldn't use the word "cheap tricks", over the years, people have worked out really efficient and ingenious ways to "cheat" how light works in real time rendering. Real time RT is just the technology finally getting to the point where we can get viable performance in real time. Even then, still with a lot of caveats like upscaling, framegen, limiting the amount of light bounces, and so on.

>(even if you use "baked" lighting, which is labor intensive and has many issues, although it can produce great results).
I don't think the issue with baked lighting is just the fact that it's labour intensive, it definitely is, but there's also the fact that saving those baked light maps takes a lot of space, especially in games with dynamic time of day, weather systems, dynamic/destructable enviroments, or open worlds, or worse yet, all of them combined.
Cutting down on the work to manually light every scene is nice, yeah, but also the fact that running all those calculations locally instead of having a ton of lightmaps as part of the game's install would save a lot of space for the end user in addition to making it easier for the devs.

Don't think the compute is there yet though, at least not until mid-end consumer/console tier GPUs can run say, fully path traced cyberpunk at a stable 30 w/o upscaling and framegen, at least at 1440p. shit like framegen shouldn't be the way forward. And with the way things are going, I don't see it happening anytime soon.

>>40858
Reflections give it away, while it was massivly oversold by marketers the reality is reflections and shadows are way better with RT.

>>41993 thx for replying to my post ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
1. sure then, elegant tricks that break easily
2. yeah, like I said, baked lighting has many issues
3. i agree that current hardware isn't powerful enough for real time path tracing. too few samples are being used in order to allow for playable framerates, so they use extremely aggressive denoising that looks kinda awful. maybe in like 10 years, i don't know
4. i also agree that framegen sucks ass and is an abomination, and framegen fans should be sent to reeducation camps or be euthanized