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Norion said:
How does needing hours to render a single frame for big budget films change the fact that path tracing is a huge leap over traditional methods in video games and will cause a big increase in visual fidelity when it becomes standard in them? The performance cost is going to decline overtime, you just need to compare how much better 4000 series cards are at ray tracing compared to 2000 series ones so eventually it won't be difficult for even mid-range hardware to do path tracing. It's far more than just the water, it's the entire environment that gets a big boost to fidelity and it doesn't prove your point at all since you don't need a GPU anywhere near that expensive to run it. It's literally a clickbait title, come on. A game as demanding as Cyberpunk has path tracing now and you don't need a top end GPU to run it thanks to DLSS. The point is that even games with simple visuals due to a low budget will benefit a lot from it by having far better lighting than anything on the PS4. |
It's a nice to have, it's not a must have for me.
To be honest too I would not be surprised at all if Nvidia comes up with a way where the AI can look at a frame of a ray traced environment and eventually learn to simulate a similar look with baked effects and reflections to just bypass the whole real time light bounce issue entirely. You can create a shiny/reflective environmental look even with baked lighting, the human brain is not really wired to understand how light bounces off objects exactly. Yes a person can say headlights from a car should illuminate outwards in a cone pattern, but do they know how exactly it would reflect off a sign or a window 15 feet away at 27 degree angle? No. You have a lot of leeway to be able to cheat.
Because you'll never resolve that, not any time soon, even a highest end GPU cannot in Blender run in real time even 5 frames per second when you push the light bounces to a certain level of accuracy even on a scene with like N64 level of geometry and textures. This is why movies, because they push to the maximum detail, have to be rendered frame by individual frame sometimes taking hours on end to just render one second of usable footage.
If anything this wouldn't be a bad use case scenario for the "external Switch dock that has hardware inside of it". For people who really want ray tracing, let it be an option to buy an external dock with a beefier GPU that maybe handles all the lighting/reflections when docked. It wouldn't change the game play, it would just add some maybe more processor intensive lighting and reflection effects.
Here's another example too from Blender (a 3D computer graphics program), EEVEE is basically baked lighting, Cycles is ray tracing basically (real time light bounces accurately processed). First look how closely EEVEE is able to match Cycles. Secondly understand the EEVEE version took like 1/7th the time to render as the Cycles version.
In a video game where you are moving fast, are you really going to notice the difference here that much? Sure in a Hollywood movie that's blown up and meant to be shown on a 200 foot screen, they will go for max fidelity ... but for a video game. I don't know if it's necessary to take the massive processing hit.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 08 September 2023
