this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Showerthoughts
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I feel like gamedevs and game publishers are more excited about raytracing than consumers, because it would allow them to throw out the entire range of ~~smokes and mirrors~~ tricks currently used for simulating lighting. Which makes the code simpler and cheaper to implement.
Raytracing is really the more obvious way of implementing complex lighting, it's just always been out of reach performance-wise.
Well, it still is. Games still use those same tricks and then only mild raytracing on top for the finishing touches.
Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.
Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.
Ray tracing also doesn't replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.
The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.
The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.
The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia's money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.
Yeah, fair response. I started writing that comment thinking "if it's in high-end hardware now, it'll be broadly available in 10–20 years".
Then with the last sentence, I realized that it isn't in high-end hardware, not in the form that allows you to throw out all the tricks.
And with publishers simultaneously wanting ever more fidelity, which makes it more expensive to calculate appropriate raytracing, yeah, I would be surprised, if that happens in our lifetime, too.
I guess, I'm personally somewhat excited at the thought of not having to learn all the tricks, with me having dabbled in gamedev as a hobbyist.
But yesterday, the (completely unilluminated) 2D gravity simulation I'm working on started kicking in my fans and you see me immediately investigating, because I'm certainly a lot more excited about making it available to as many people as possible...
I'm not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.
The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the "tricks" that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).
Unfortunately, the bad news is that you'd still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!
Hope you make something cool from the hobby!