Re:Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
by hyperpallium on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @12:23AM
(#16626048)
In the realtime performance vs developer time tradeoff, the magnitudes are important... and also, their value.
For a long time, games pushed the graphics envelope, but that doesn't seem the case any more. So perhaps that's less important today, and GPUs have overshot gamer needs.
OTOH, development costs of AAA games are incredibly high. with larger worlds at higher res. Even worse at 4K.
So the question of the magnitudes remains.
2018: the year of raytracing in games, finally?
A data-point is that Imagination has had hardware raytracing for several years now: https://www.imgtec.com/legacy-gpu-cores/ray-tracing/ But without publicised success.
Re:Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
by bhouston on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @03:04AM
(#16626493)
The cost of games is not the render engine, remember that most use ue4 or unity. The cost of games 90% is asset and gameplay and UI/UX development.
Re:Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing
by hyperpallium on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @04:00AM
(#16626699)
By "larger worlds at higher res" I meant higher cost of asset development.
That's not always the case. Physically based materials, tonemapping and many more were widely adopted in game engines because they're easier to get proper and predictable results with. It's the same with most rendering techniques based on real physics, they are usually easier to work with, which is a very real advantage which allows devs to make more realistic environments in less time.
It's the same process that led the non-realtime world to physically based renderers, although it is slower in GPUs because of obvious hardware constraints.