Ray Tracing is Here

Microsoft just announced ray tracing extensions of Dx12 and Nvidia has announced their own hardware accelerated real time ray tracing. They've been working up to this for a while, with MS planning on making ray tracing and VR central to their next generation Xbox, likely to use an AMD ryzen chip modified for the purpose. That's because they both require more powerful computers, with real time ray tracing merely adding realistic lighting to any existing rasterized engine. Otoy has already added real time ray tracing to cellphones, but the bigger the display and the higher the resolution the more power it requires. Adding ray tracing to rasterized engines requires the developers to tweak them a bit to make it look right but, once popular, we should see a variety of older games coming out with the option.

This is all new stuff, but likely they have already been working with the video game developers and we should see games coming on the market soon, capable of real time ray tracing, or global illumination as its also known. It requires roughly 30% more computing capacity, depending on the program.

 

You were the previous user, WuLei whatchamacallit weren't ya?

 

Yeah, the webmaster said he would see what he could do to merge my two accounts.

 

I knew it!

 

How did you guess?

 

Well you post the same AMD technology stuff and pretty much the same exact posts your old user name did. I'm like an elephant who never forgets.

 

My memory for things like that sucks, but I can work a rubic's cube in my head! It kept me from getting bored sometimes, before I mastered every pattern on the cube. I can sing like professional, but I can never remember the words. I had to practice anything and everything that my brain could possibly do, just to help sort out the mess, but mastering the English language and that of mother nature is what really made a difference. Asians use more parts of their brains for language, they see more of the forest through the trees.

 

These are examples of a ray tracing demo from Epic games and a Futuremark benchmark, and a video explaining hybrid ray tracing. By using robots and helmets they reduce the load on the computer. Video game characters also often wear fingerless gloves, just like Mickey Mouse wears gloves and has oversized three fingered hands, just because its easier to draw and, believe it or not, looks better than the alternatives. Hybrid ray tracing merely adds realistic lighting and shadows to existing rasterized engines. Perhaps the biggest advantages we'll see in the first video games to use this is much improved cut scenes, shadows, glass surfaces like windows, shinny surfaces, and the elimination of picket fencing, but it makes video games much more 3D just to use more realistic lighting.

 

Epic just released another demo, this is next generation animation that requires a ridiculous computer right now. Very likely, within the first few years of the next generation Xbox coming on the market we can see video game manufacturers suddenly make "breakthroughs" they've been hiding for years that make rendering something ultra-realistic like this incredibly less computationally intensive. The same thing happens with each generation of video game consoles inspiring developers to compete for more efficient ways to render the same scenes on limited hardware.

 

I just bought a MacBook

 

You do know, its been proven that an apple a day does not keep the doctor away?

 

I don't know. I needed a new computer and I bought one.

That's all I know. I know there is a whole rivalry between brands, but, I'm like, whatever.

Been using Macs at work for years. I'm more familiar with them at this point. That's my deciding factor.

*Shrugs*

 

I know the feeling, for me, laptops are the legacy of Steve Jobs come to haunt us all. The rest of the industry resembles the Mafia on a good day.

 

This video is of two engineers discussing Nvidia's new Volta based ray tracing technology to be released in their Ampere video card this summer. Engineers have their own hardware porn, and these two take forever to explain that Nvidia's RTX ray tracing uses a combination of hardware acceleration (an IBM asic) and noise reduction algorithms. The amount of noise they can effectively eliminate from a render is impressive, and my guess is they are using the same IBM asic "tensor cores" to do the noise cancellation. Its perhaps the most dramatic use of AI technology to date in the consumer market, besides self-driving cars, and we should see many more to come in the next few years in consumer electronics.

IBM's asic is incredibly fast and Nvidia has had both the time and money to invest in the best algorithms. Nvidia graphics cards will also be powering the free to join "Liquid Sky" cloud gaming service, which AMD has also spent considerable time making their graphics cards compatible with and which is used by Bethesda video game developers in particular, who have helped AMD fundamentally redesign their graphics cards to play games faster using less memory. Its all about cutting out the fat, or latencies, in electronics and faking it until you make it. Most people have no clue just how much Byzantine insanity goes into something as simple as producing something as simple as a cheap TV or monitor, because they are designed to fake it in every way imaginable, rather than even attempt to reproduce reality.

For the immediate future, ray tracing will join the list of tools developers can use to fake it better than ever before. Sometimes, you don't want to know how they fake it so well, because it spoils the illusion forever. Like the first video cards designed for textures or rasterization, over the next five years or so developers should find a wide variety of excellent uses for the asic circuitry on them, other than ray tracing, that Nvidia never dreamed of. That's part of what's exciting about this video card, because its ability to render real time ray tracing without stuttering is going to probably be an issue for years to come for anyone who doesn't own a monster computer, but that's not all its good for and, personally, I love surprises.

 

This is enough to make your head spin, and is coming to a console near you for cut-scenes at first.

 

The Metro 2033 series is based on a popular Russian science fiction series and distinguished this game from the start by incorporating anything 3D that you can imagine, from a first person perspective, including riding a mining car through tunnels like Indiana Jones. They quickly became famous for replacing Crysis as the benchmark for high resolution 3D graphics that can cripple almost any computer, and this demo shows what their newest game looks like in ray traced lighting. The game will also come HDR10+ compatible for those who just can't muster the frame rates.

Different types of TVs and monitors make a sort of "cartoonish" compromise on reality, and combined with the cartoonish and waxy or plastic textures in video games it just gets worse. However, using 1440p and 4k resolutions combined with HDR or ray tracing, you can compensate better for the current limitations of monitors and add more verisimilitude. An important thing to remember when looking at demos like these is that these are the early attempts, and we should see significant improvements within the next five years, as well as, significant reductions in the power required to run such games at high frame rates and resolutions.

Despite games like Crysis and Metro giving more of an "open world" feel than corridor shooters like Doom, they are still corridor shooters designed to emphasis just how much eye candy they can squeeze into a scene at really high frame rates. Metro was partially funded by Nvidia as a way to showcase their technology, which is why it was designed for 3D, multicore rendering, and high resolutions from the ground up. The addition of ray traced lighting allows for easy programming of new types of AI, such as characters recognizing what each other is doing and looking the player in the eye. Above is the ray traced empty world Metro, and below is the 4k HDR version of actual game play. Its actually part role playing game, and by adding full body motion capture at some point in the future, the engine could be used to create an impressive virtual reality by anyone's standards, because it is focused on the first person perspective. The fate of yesterday's best corridor shooters is to become tomorrow's open world games.

Being able to render it in either HDR on even a lower resolution 1080p monitor means you could have your choice between a more cartoonish look or adding AI and more realism and eye-candy. This version is coming out this year and, I would not be surprised, if their next game came out with the next generation consoles and included ray traced lighting and AI as an option.

 

Here are ten game trailers for games coming out in 2018-19 which, with a few exceptions, are all obviously rendered in ray traced lighting and using all the bells and whistles to make the games look even better than they will on the current consoles and PCs. Using ray traced trailers to sell video games that are not ray traced has been a bit controversial, but these examples illustrate just how much verisimilitude ray traced light can add to modern video games and what we might be able to routinely expect out of the next generation consoles, in addition to their ability to render VR.