Thread: Dev talk: Some fun numbers why ray tracing is saving the day for large scale games

regawdless

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We all remember Assassin's Creed Unity and how much praise the lighting got?

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Looking good! That was done by placing lighting probes & using baked lighting. The game didn't have a huge world, around 4 square km and 4 times of day, that lighting data took around 15gb of disc space.
Now the devs had a tech talk and revealed what using such a system for AC Shadows with it's way larger world would look like.

It would mean:
1.9 TB of data for the lighting
Baking time for the lighting of 624 days

=
absolutely not feasible

Real time ray tracing enables devs to increase the scale of the world and at the same time the quality of the visuals, while using less data and saving a ton of time.

id Software devs also talked about how using RT saved around one year of development time while increasing the quality of the art & design because they were able to immediately iterate instead of having to approximate and bake each scene before seeing the changes.

Interestingly enough, this also means great times ahead for the quality of smaller games. That's something we've already seen happening with Lumen in UE5, enabling high qualiy games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 being made by a small team. Using traditional rendering would take way too much time and UE5 enables lighting changes in real time thanks to RT.

RT will bring more power to smaller and mid sized studios because it'll destroy the resource barrier that was there with traditional lighting. It took so much of their time, while larger studios had dedicated teams working on it, creating this gap in quality. Which has been destroyed and we'll see better and better results with an increasing adoptions rate from devs. The playing field has been leveled in regards to lighting.
 
Counterpoint: the quality of a game's lighting bears little significance for the quality of said game as a game. Most games do not, in fact, need photorealistic graphics and detailed lighting. So making the tools to make those, available to more smaller indie studios, will just mean that more games will feature graphical effects they absolutely do not need, thus increasing their hardware requirements, and at best adding nothing to the game's overall quality.
 
Counterpoint: the quality of a game's lighting bears little significance for the quality of said game as a game. Most games do not, in fact, need photorealistic graphics and detailed lighting. So making the tools to make those, available to more smaller indie studios, will just mean that more games will feature graphical effects they absolutely do not need, thus increasing their hardware requirements, and at best adding nothing to the game's overall quality.

You're making the mistake of associating photorealism with RT and underestimating the impact of lighting on the art, level design and gameplay. Games play with light and shadows for sneaking, use lighting to highlight areas of interest, leading the player through the world by showing him where to go in subtle ways etc. All of this is being done manually, placing lights, testing the result, improving it etc. takes up a lot of time and effort. No 3D game can avoid it, even if you have simple and artsy lighting, there's a lot of manual work involved. Even in such cases, RT makes it way faster and more efficient, shifting dev time from busywork to improving the actual gameplay instead of wasting time to work on lighting.

Regarding hardware requirements, Doom The Dark Ages is RT only and runs extremely well on low end cards like a 3060, it always depends on the devs. Software Lumen is also doing a good job with lower end cards.

I mean, yes you can argue that visuals don't matter and gameplay is king. But visuals do enhance games significantly. A detailed and believable dynamic open world makes it better for me. A horror section with scary lighting and shadows help the game a lot. It's a visual medium, visuals are important.
 
"Low end". XD

Just because the Thrust SSC exists, it doesn't make an Indycar racer the 'low end' of personal transportation options.

I don't understand. The 3060 was the second cheapest Nvidia card from two generations ago, launched four years ago and can be bought for like 250 bucks. It's a low end card and can be found in many laptops as well with the laptop variant not being significantly weaker than the desktop variant. Nvidias xx60 cards are low end GPUs.
 
I don't understand. The 3060 was the second cheapest Nvidia card from two generations ago, launched four years ago and can be bought for like 250 bucks. It's a low end card and can be found in many laptops as well with the laptop variant not being significantly weaker than the desktop variant. Nvidias xx60 cards are low end GPUs.

Low end is integrated graphics to stuff like the Arc B570. The 3060 is an old mid range card.
 
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Low end is integrated graphics to stuff like the Arc B570. The 3060 is an old mid range card.
They are low end among the RT-capable GPUs.
You want low end, you look at something more along the lines of Steam Deck.

Integrated GPUs are the actual 'low end'. That's the thing the average person with a PC is more likely to have.


I was talking about dedicated GPUs and I'd say the xx60 cards are in the upper low end but they aren't midrange cards.

Mood point though, a 3050 costs like 150 bucks and runs Doom at max settings at 1080p with DLSS Quality mode at nearly 50fps. You can't go much cheaper on a dedicated card, and the card runs it really well. Drop to high settings and DLSS Balanced, and you'll even get very high fps gaming.

If you bought any Nvidia GPU in the last seven years, the game will run great. Integrated graphics are an interesting topic, there are a ton of them out there but I'd need to see some numbers on how many are actually using them for gaming vs having them as a secondary device and happen to have Steam installed.

Btw. the game runs on a Steam Deck, lowest settings, native res, 30-40 fps.

 
As much as I enjoy what RT has to offer, I would love for more custom solutions that offer better optimised performance in modern games. Baked lights and probes can still offer fantastic looking lighting whilst not being truly "accurate" the performance cost for the mid-range, or in some cases high-end, cards is simply not feasible. Nvidia trying to push MFG as a solution feels half baked and leads to dramatically higher input latency whilst also not being a "true" frame rate. Lighting is expensive, of course, but I don't think RT is a catch-all solution especially when you can create vastly more interesting looking scenes when not relying on realistic light bounces and propagation.

The time efficiency and ease of implementation is certainly a plus in RT's book though.
 
As much as I enjoy what RT has to offer, I would love for more custom solutions that offer better optimised performance in modern games. Baked lights and probes can still offer fantastic looking lighting whilst not being truly "accurate" the performance cost for the mid-range, or in some cases high-end, cards is simply not feasible. Nvidia trying to push MFG as a solution feels half baked and leads to dramatically higher input latency whilst also not being a "true" frame rate. Lighting is expensive, of course, but I don't think RT is a catch-all solution especially when you can create vastly more interesting looking scenes when not relying on realistic light bounces and propagation.

The time efficiency and ease of implementation is certainly a plus in RT's book though.

It's a data thing as well. Having large amounts of probes will cause terabytes of data. So for large open world games, it's either your game being over 1tb or having way less light probes. Which results in the artists not being able to realize their vision and their art because there aren't enough light probes in the budget, them being locked out of making their world look the way they want it to. They can't use light probes despite wanting to, causing very bad looking bland lighting where it all looks the same like we've seen since the PS360 days.

To your point about "realistic" light bounces being forced with RT: that's not correct, ray tracing just means that rays are being traced, but the artist can adjust all the values of those rays. The rays can be super short, or overly long and extremely defined, or have weird shapes, or being very broad and undefined. You can set light bounce to 0 and you won't have any light bounce etc. You can exclude objects from the RT as well. You can do whatever you want and at that point, you can do everything you did before just in a way more efficient way.
 
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I was talking about dedicated GPUs and I'd say the xx60 cards are in the upper low end but they aren't midrange cards.

Mood point though, a 3050 costs like 150 bucks and runs Doom at max settings at 1080p with DLSS Quality mode at nearly 50fps. You can't go much cheaper on a dedicated card, and the card runs it really well. Drop to high settings and DLSS Balanced, and you'll even get very high fps gaming.

If you bought any Nvidia GPU in the last seven years, the game will run great. Integrated graphics are an interesting topic, there are a ton of them out there but I'd need to see some numbers on how many are actually using them for gaming vs having them as a secondary device and happen to have Steam installed.

Btw. the game runs on a Steam Deck, lowest settings, native res, 30-40 fps.


You may as well say 1080ti is low end because it'll be comparable in price and performance today.

I will agree that xx50 series cards were Nvidia's low end cards (ignoring the xx30 series which were always dog shit.), but that's why they don't make them anymore.

Meanwhile the xx60 series has always been and remains their mid range and most popular cards, and that's despite the fact their prices have been creeping up wellinto what used to be the beginning of high end pricing.

You're once again exhibiting normalcy bias, where you assume most PC players are somewhat comparable to your own experiences, where as for most a xx60 series card is a major investment to show they're series about PC gaming as a hobby.
 
You may as well say 1080ti is low end because it'll be comparable in price and performance today.

I will agree that xx50 series cards were Nvidia's low end cards (ignoring the xx30 series which were always dog shit.), but that's why they don't make them anymore.

Meanwhile the xx60 series has always been and remains their mid range and most popular cards, and that's despite the fact their prices have been creeping up wellinto what used to be the beginning of high end pricing.

You're once again exhibiting normalcy bias, where you assume most PC players are somewhat comparable to your own experiences, where as for most a xx60 series card is a major investment to show they're series about PC gaming as a hobby.

Just different perspectives, not really bias.

My perspective:
We're talking about gaming. So when you want to game, you will buy a gaming PC or laptop. The cheapest gaming laptops have a 3050 oder 4050, are available and will play Doom very well. You can buy the cheapest Intel desktop GPUs as well as the 4050 or 3050, that's the lowest end in gaming, and have a great time.

When you argue that the lowest end gaming hardware are laptops without any gaming hardware but still should be taken into account, then we simply have a different base assumption.

It's like saying the lowest end AI workload cards are non AI workload cards without AI capabilities. Yeah, maybe technically, but then where do we stop? You can play OG Doom on a PDF, is that the lowest tier hardware to include because everyone has a PDF viewer on their mobile phones?

Price increases and affordability for the gaming hobby are definitely important topics. I just wouldn't include non gaming hardware in discussions about gaming hardware.

People using integrated graphics should all be deported to Tuvalu where they can't play games either way.
 
Just different perspectives, not really bias.

My perspective:
We're talking about gaming. So when you want to game, you will buy a gaming PC or laptop. The cheapest gaming laptops have a 3050 oder 4050, are available and will play Doom very well. You can buy the cheapest Intel desktop GPUs as well as the 4050 or 3050, that's the lowest end in gaming, and have a great time.

When you argue that the lowest end gaming hardware are laptops without any gaming hardware but still should be taken into account, then we simply have a different base assumption.

It's like saying the lowest end AI workload cards are non AI workload cards without AI capabilities. Yeah, maybe technically, but then where do we stop? You can play OG Doom on a PDF, is that the lowest tier hardware to include because everyone has a PDF viewer on their mobile phones?

Price increases and affordability for the gaming hobby are definitely important topics. I just wouldn't include non gaming hardware in discussions about gaming hardware.

People using integrated graphics should all be deported to Tuvalu where they can't play games either way.

Both Intel and AMD make laptops with very competent APU processors that can handle gaming competently. Same with desktops in fact.

I would highly recommend looking at the Steam Survey data as it shows that xx50 and xx60 series cards are the overwhelmingly favoured option for the vast majority (about 48%), and that integrated graphics solutions show up in far greater numbers than the high end cards, with only two xx70 cards being more popular than the most popular integrated options, and even then there's barely more than half of one percent usage difference between either of those two and the two most popular integrated ones.

Actually now I'm looking at the latest survey, the thing that confuses me most is how unpopular the 3050 ti seems to be, at about 100th place, while the plain 3050 is the 6th most popular. Weird.
 
Both Intel and AMD make laptops with very competent APU processors that can handle gaming competently. Same with desktops in fact.

I would highly recommend looking at the Steam Survey data as it shows that xx50 and xx60 series cards are the overwhelmingly favoured option for the vast majority (about 48%), and that integrated graphics solutions show up in far greater numbers than the high end cards, with only two xx70 cards being more popular than the most popular integrated options, and even then there's barely more than half of one percent usage difference between either of those two and the two most popular integrated ones.

Actually now I'm looking at the latest survey, the thing that confuses me most is how unpopular the 3050 ti seems to be, at about 100th place, while the plain 3050 is the 6th most popular. Weird.

Yeah fuck APUs. Deport APU owners to Tuvalu as well.

PROBLEM SOLVED
 
Actually now I'm looking at the latest survey, the thing that confuses me most is how unpopular the 3050 ti seems to be, at about 100th place, while the plain 3050 is the 6th most popular. Weird.
Not sure how the survey breaks it down, but there's a 6GB version of the 3050 that does not require an additional 6 or 8 pin power connection and is also available in a low profile form factor. I'm guessing a lot of these 6GB 3050s end up in pre-builts that lack addition PSU connections.

Few years back, I helped a friend upgrade an old Lenovo office PC for his son, who was wanting to try some PC gaming. The Lenovo had the same issue with lacking PCIe power cables and a new PSU was not in the budget, so we were limited to a 1650.
 
Not sure how the survey breaks it down, but there's a 6GB version of the 3050 that does not require an additional 6 or 8 pin power connection and is also available in a low profile form factor. I'm guessing a lot of these 6GB 3050s end up in pre-builts that lack addition PSU connections.

Few years back, I helped a friend upgrade an old Lenovo office PC for his son, who was wanting to try some PC gaming. The Lenovo had the same issue with lacking PCIe power cables and a new PSU was not in the budget, so we were limited to a 1650.

Interest point!

It only lists a '3050', however the 3050 Laptop and 3050 6GB Laptop are listed separately, so it may just be that the 3050 6GB was less than what was given data for individually, but I have no idea.

Regardless the 3050 being 3.12% of all GPU's and the 3050ti being just 0.19% is still weird.
 
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