Ray Tracing Denoising
alain.xyz
alain.xyz
https://research.nvidia.com/publication/interactive-reconstr...
Two Minute Papers did a nice explanation of it:
There's a bit of a meme going around that DLSS stands for 'doesn't look so sharp'
Did you mean to say "run with DLSS disabled"? RTX contains all the new features including ray tracing, which is not the same as DLSS. There are several games where many people feel they are indeed much better aesthetics-wise with RTX on, not off. At the very least it's a matter of preference, and not "better" in general to have RTX off.
For n=1 I've played Metro with RTX on lower settings and without RTX on higher settings, and I prefer without. I think realtime raytracing came out a hw generation too soon.
https://au.ign.com/articles/2019/04/17/what-is-ray-tracing-a...
https://www.techradar.com/au/news/we-tested-ray-tracing-in-c...
You prefer the latter. Many people prefer ray tracing on. In fact the main complaint online is about the cost of cards, very few people seem to contest that scenes where ray tracing is properly artistically used, have superior aesthetic quality to them and superior realism. (assuming that's what you mean, since you keep using the term "RTX" and it's unclear what you talk about, whether it's ray tracing or DLSS etc.)
> assuming that's what you mean, since you keep using the term "RTX" and it's unclear what you talk about, whether it's ray tracing or DLSS etc.
I use the term the same way NVIDIA uses it. RTX is anything an RTX core accelerates. Still confused? I think that might have been the intention of their marketing team.
> very few people seem to contest that scenes where ray tracing is properly artistically used, have superior aesthetic quality
This is quantifiable bs. Ray tracing as a technique is superior to rasterisation, but only with sufficient flops. And the current generation of hardware does not yield that critical number. So we get 'ray tracing', but so subdued and limited that existing approaches just flat out look better and also perform better.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoER1DwYLY
Or if you want a more approachable comparison of RTX vs. not-RTX. consider Minecraft+RTX[1] vs. Minecraft+PTGI[2]
None of these corroborate the idea of RTX effects being aesthetically inferior, or that this is a widely held opinion.
Consider watching these for an up-to-date take on the subject.
I'm thinking that maybe I should actually write a ray tracer. Is that still a worthwhile thing to do, or has the world moved on?
FWIW, I never solved the ray-oblique cone problem...
Writing them is still really fun, it’s no less useful today for learning things than it was 20 years ago. You can get amazing pictures with not very much code, and the algorithms are really satisfying to understand & implement.
There are also still tons of low hanging fruit. You’d think the easy problems would be mined out by now, but they’re not. New developments are actively happening with intersection primitives, color handling, sampling, direct lighting, shadowing, the list goes on. If you want to do research, you don’t have to dive that deep to find something unsolved that is solveable.
For an oblique cone intersection, I don’t know the right answer, but the oblique cone is a skew transform of a regular cone, right? You might be able to use a regular cone intersector, but pre-transform the ray by the inverse skew transform?
This resource is fantastic for finding intersection building blocks and code examples: http://www.realtimerendering.com/intersections.html
https://github.com/jimsnow/glome/blob/master/GlomeTrace/Data...
One trick is simplify the problem to just doing a ray-intersection test with an axis-aligned cone, and to handle the general case not by complicating the ray-intersection test but rather applying the inverse transform on the ray itself. You can use the same trick to support oblique cones: just figure out what skew transform you want to apply to the cone, and apply the reverse transform on the ray.
There is a switch where you can turn the denoising of the ray-traced output on/off: it shows tremendous difference, to a point where it's hard to even imagine looking at the noisy image that it is even possible to extract the denoised version.
While accurately simulating optics is needfully computationally expensive and gives special-purpose graphics hardware an advantage, it's not clear that psychologically subjective high quality graphics (i.e. generating visuals which are inaccurate but convincing to humans) has such a need.
What you're describing is rasterization, which is what the industry standard is (at least for games) for decades.
Generating visuals with an autoencoder, albeit hinted by noisy physically-based raytracing, is not an optical technique; detail is generated from a visual statistical model, not an optical simulation.
That is an optical simulation :)
Comparing this overview to one of the most basic techniques that is used everywhere and is a given is like reading an article on a modern car engine and dismissing it because you saw someone light some gas on fire 30 years ago.
I understand you know what low discrepancy samples are, but equating the very first demonstration that random sampling wasn't ideal for day tracing, to the state of the art that has evolved over three decades of research is ludicrous.
I don't know why you are desperate to be dismissive but it has no basis whatsoever in reality.
> desperate to be dismissive
How is clarifying what I was commenting on "desperate"? I feel like you're trying to escalate here.
That's it, no need to attribute malice anywhere. I think you are reading way too much into 'rbkillea's comments.
There is a recent paper about generalizing n-rooks sampling to higher dimensions which seems to have been misunderstood by yourself and others. It was written by researchers who already have dozens of high profile papers on many different topics.