This trailer shows an example of the new HDR10 standard, already being incorporated in new TVs by the major manufacturers, because it is a free standard that allows even a 1080p TV or monitor to imitate 4k resolutions at the push of a button. Besides just more pixels, what 4k offers is a wider shade of colors and brightness, and by merely making TVs and monitors roughly twice as bright as most already are they can produce compelling imitations of a high resolution monitor or TV. These sometimes use eight different back-lights to light up one part of the screen, while keeping other sections darker and provide a better 3D picture in general and movies and video games can be adapted to light up different parts of screen to accurately reproduce colors in different lighting. The original Metro 2033 was put together by some of the same people who worked on the Stalker open world games, but was designed from the beginning as a corridor shooter to showcase Nvidia's latest 3D and virtual reality technology. Corridor shooters attempt to simultaneously provide the highest frame rates possible, and the most fantastic graphics as well if your system can handle the pressure. However, these are still die-hard open world Stalker programmers, and this next installment of the Metro series includes 13 different areas that can be explored in a nonlinear fashion. Although a lot of people don't realize it, the original Crysis was a corridor shooter made to look more open world. The 4A engine is ideal for showcasing Nvidia's new ray tracing technology coming out with the release of their first Ampere video cards this summer, which include asics for real time ray tracing. Below is an example of a ray traced scene from Metro Exodus that hints at the possibilities. Besides more realistic lighting for glass and shadows in particular, ray tracing makes an incredible number of optical illusions possible that will blow your mind and makes programming AI for characters incredibly simple. However, ray tracing is so computationally expensive that Nvidia spent a decade studying how to compensate for a low resolution ray traced image, so their hardware only had to meet them half way. This video would look outrageously grainy and patchy without it.
Games like this are already becoming the new Hollywood block busters, which will become more apparent with the next generation consoles. The remaining unanswered questions include which video game engines will be capable of producing the highest frame rates, and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Squeezing in more graphics means they can also squeeze in motion capture and an endless variety of AI and physics. If it is anything like rasterization, it will require at least six to ten years just to get the fundamentals down as to the best way to render everything. The optical illusions it makes possible really are mind blowing and a bewildering variety. However, I expect most video games will still retain this sort of washed out or pastel cartoonish look for many years to come, merely because current TVs and monitors can't render anything else very well.
On this reality home improvement show "The Vanilla Ice Project" a video game company installed 2 [ liquid cooled ] PC's The coolant looked like green radiator fluid too... crazy shit.
Radiator fluid would ruin the system, and people normally put in distilled water which is unlikely to short out anything and add a little coloring and pool water treatment to kill bacteria. Within two years, a console may have the same amount of raw graphics power, because it only requires half the computing power of what a PC does thanks to using standardized hardware.
This trailer contains examples of the game being played. Note the opening scene shows a facemask that appears to have realistic looking glass because it is a cutscene rendered in ray traced lighting to begin with, while the rest of the trailer is shot in HDR10 making the textures and images "pop" more out of the screen than usual. Current consoles use a similar, but less detailed an approach known as upscaling. In general, new special effects like this are added in small portions at first. However, some video game engines such as the id tech engines, are designed from the ground up for using ray traced lighting that can even be pre-baked into the game. Like a movie reel, these engines can spool all the textures and lighting off even a hard drive using extreme compression and can use up to 26 cpu cores to decompress everything. That approach is far from ideal because you cannot change the outdoor lighting in any given level, but it makes it possible for a weaker computer to render very similar images at a much higher frame rate. What people often do with such high tech corridor shooter engines is adapt them for other purposes such as adding more physics and AI which, of course, leverages computers always becoming more powerful. By making real time ray tracing an option at first, or rendering it as pre-baked into a game, they can work on enhancing scenes such as indoor ones with limited lighting and geometry, while they wait for the technology to render all the lighting as ray tracing to become more affordable. Where ray tracing is almost certain to become commonly pre-baked into an engine is with race car video games, flying games, and arcade style games in general. Little kids and race cars alike love for everything to sparkle and the ability to add an enormous variety of optical effects over the long run will make for a lot of happy drivers, pilots, and little kids. How fast these engines are is everything, with 30-60fps only being good at lower resolutions for slower games, while 80-120+fps is a good minimum for higher resolutions and VR. The Metro series aims for a more ambitious balance between flexibility and adding all the eye candy they can in real time from a first person perspective. For example, relying on confined underground spaces they can add more fog and smoke and focus on depth effects and explosions without bogging down the system. The little stream flowing down hill into town in this scene is the same one rendered in the ray traced demo and illustrates how much more sparkle ray tracing can bring to the table, in addition to the most complex reflections imaginable. That little bit of extra sparkle might not make a big difference on a small screen, but in virtual reality it can lend the scene all that much more realism because you are seeing it in almost perfect 3D.
This is a technical breakdown of the graphics in the trailer. The speaker mentions things like the reflections of different colored lights on the player's gun as helping to increase the 3D depth perception and sense of realistic lighting. Bloom effects are something older PC gamers have come to hate, but were the primitive precursors to HDR10 which empowers the programmers to adapt the bloom effect to a wide range of brightness from imitating a noon day sun to the moon or an oil lamp, while keeping other parts of the screen quite dark in comparison and still being able to render details in shadowy areas. Subsurface scattering is a newer, physically based, rendering technique used to make everything look less waxy and plastic, especially skin, which is difficult to do at lower resolutions. Using their muted pastel palate of colors and textures helps to hide the same waxy look which, otherwise, would stand out more like a sore thumb in some cases. Until ray tracing becomes ubiquitous, perhaps in another twenty years, we'll still see improvements being made to existing rasterized engines.
Quite frankly such bounds forward into more & more immersive technology worry me greatly. When it gets to the point that we can no longer differentiate between reality & a virtual facsimile.
The technology is adapted to the operator, meaning it is fundamentally analog and is widely used for even medical purposes, and studied extensively. For example, the Mind Maze headset is made by a major medical company and, among other things, successfully used to relieve phantom pain in amputees. My own interest is in producing an analog distributed computer capable of generating the necessary complexity to amplify the operators yin-yang dynamics, providing a platform specifically designed for introspective purposes. Only by no longer making distinctions between who we are and what we are doing, can any become poetry in motion and learn how to live their dream. The technology is no different from fire, and can be used and abused by anyone, but I think you'll be amazed at just how much it can promote personal growth as the wave of the future. Considering one in five Americans insist the sun revolves around the earth, a video game is a good place to start.
This is a PC gamer's impressions of the last game in the series. Little kids who are used to playing run-n-gun style games where you shoot a thousand enemies in 20 minutes are often disappointed with this game, which is a PC shooter and role playing survival game at heart and not originally designed for consoles. Using higher resolution screens, mouse and keyboard, and higher frame rates of 144+ PC gamers can often easily make shots a console gamer would struggle with. Metro does include scenes where you mow down the oncoming hoards of monsters with a chain gun or whatever, but the emphasis is on the ability to do it all as the reviewer points out. Fallout 3 was the first popular open world shooter and included a great deal more RPG elements into its vast world, and was widely considered the best bang-for-your-buck on the market as video games go. A ton of content as well as a nice artistic style and sense of humor, combined with a slower pace of action. In comparison, the first two Metro games were almost hollow shells of worlds, but the company has grown dramatically since then and is obviously embellishing upon the game in every way imaginable. Still, I expect its main focus to be on the graphics and shooter mechanics, with the RPG elements being added only as they add to the immersion, making conserving ammo more important. Like Fallout 4, Metro also has its own somewhat unique shooting and moving mechanics and approach to the genre and, what everyone is hoping for, is the next installment will showcase more of the programmer's expertise and artistic style in survival role playing games.
This is a quick breakdown of the current state of ray tracing in video games, that doesn't discuss Nvidia's upcoming Ampere video card optimized for ray tracing. The reviewer knows his stuff but, like most video game reviewers, doesn't really know the hardware. In this case, higher bandwidth memory, that is only now coming on the market at affordable prices, has been holding back real time ray tracing. Already processors and graphics cards are pushing the limits of what kind of heat silicon can take and the biggest improvements being made are in faster memory, dedicated circuitry, and higher bandwidth interconnects. Supposedly, Nvidia's newest Ampere video card might have 2-4tbs of bandwidth capacity which means the only question is when will real time ray tracing come down in price, and we'll just have to wait for the next generation of graphics cards to come on the market to get a better idea, but you can be certain a lot of it won't be really cheap and commonplace for up to a decade.
This is the most concise account I could find for the dramatic changes in the series we can expect in the upcoming Metro Exodus. The changes he's talking about are dramatic changes, but ones that I was personally hoping they would do eventually. These are die-hard Stalker programmers, and now they are taking Metro on a train ride above ground, have abandoned the ammo economy, fashioned more home-made weapons, and included more neutral territories for you to visit. They appear to be headed in roughly the direction of St Petersburg, which would make a fantastic stop for the next video game in the series. The 4A engine was designed for everything 3D and virtual reality from a first person perspective. Doing everything 3D from a first person perspective, while cramming in as much eye-candy as possible, is not easy and you have to get the basics down first before attempting anything more complex. By largely confining the first two games to underground areas they managed to work on basic improvements to lighting, textures, effects, and mechanics before taking the game above ground to fill in all the details, add a lot more characters, and improving upon everything. The idea of using a train as a moving home-base is an interesting one that allows them to take a lot of their characters and equipment along for the ride and add a lot of dialogue and side quests. Currently, they've managed to create 2km wide areas, but that's sure to grow significantly in size with future games as the average computer becomes more powerful. The train and all the people on it become resources you have to protect and nurture.
This is a short interview with two of the people from 4A games the upcoming Metro Exodus. PC gamers tend to be suspicious of video game developers dumbing down their games and making them way to easy to win, in order to sell more copies on consoles, but the developers from 4A insist they are working on making their next game even harder to win. Instead of the bullet economy, you have to scavenge more and construct weapons and other things of value, which means the programmers can add much more complexity to the game and make it all that much harder to win at the highest settings, while still making the game easy for anyone to win at lower settings. It also provides a more complex economy where the player has to choose whether to beg, borrow, buy, or steal something and has to engage with more characters the harder the level settings they use.
