> frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature
That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play.
That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play.
So I think calling it "a bit of a gimmick" is accurate for many of the games that shipped in, even if not all of them.
Replacing all that effort with raytracing and having one unified lighting system would be a _major_ time saver, and allows much more dynamic lighting than was previously possible. So yeah some current games don't look much better with RT, but the gameplay and art direction was designed without raytracing in mind in the first place, and had a _lot_ of work put into it to get those results.
Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is amazing! And with another 3-5 years of algorithm development and hardware speedups, and developers and artists getting familiar with raytracing, we might start seeing games require raytracing.
Games typically take 4+ years to develop, so anything you're seeing coming out now was probably started when the best GPU you could buy for raytracing was an RTX 2080 TI.
Aside from Cyberpunk 2077 and a handful of ancient games with NVIDIA-sponsored remakes, what even offers fully path traced lighting as an option? The way it went for CP2077 makes your "70% usable" claim seem like quite an exaggeration: performance is only good if you have a current-generation GPU that cost at least $1k, the path tracing option didn't get added until years after the game originally shipped, and they had to fix a bunch of glitches resulting from the game world being built without path tracing in mind. We're clearly still years away from path tracing being broadly available among AAA games, let alone playable on any large portion of gaming PCs.
For the foreseeable future, games will still need to look good without fully path traced lighting.
That's why I said games aren't currently designed with only pathtracing in mind, but in 3-5 years with faster hardware and better algorithms, we'll probably start to see it be more widespread. That's typically how graphics usually develop; something that's only for high end GPUs eventually becomes accessible to everyone. SSAO used to be considered extremely demanding, and now it's accessible to even the weakest phone GPU with good enough quality.
Again the fact that it's feasible at all, even if it requires a $1000 GPU, is amazing! 5 years ago real time path tracing would've been seen as impossible.
> The way it went for CP2077 makes your "70% usable" claim seem like quite an exaggeration
Based on the raw frame timing numbers and temporal stability, I don't think it is. RT GI is currently usually around ~4ms, which is at the upper edge of usable. However the temporal stability is usually the bigger issue - at current ray counts, with current algorithms, either noise or slow response times is an inevitable tradeoff. Hence, 70% usable. But with another few years of improvements, we'll probably get to the point where we can get it down to ~2.5ms with the current stability, or 4ms and much more stable. Which would be perfectly usable.
Maybe you should be saying 70% feasible rather than 70% usable. And you seem to be very optimistic about what kind of improvements we can expect for affordable, low-power GPU hardware over a mere 3-5 years. I don't think algorithmic improvements to denoisers and upscalers can get us much further unless we're using very wrong image quality metrics to give their blurriness a passing grade. Two rays per pixel is simply never going to suffice.
Right now, an RTX 4090 ($1700+) runs at less than 50 fps at 2560x1440, unless you lie to yourself about resolution using an upscaler. So the best consumer GPU at the moment is about 70-80% of what's necessary to use path tracing and hit resolution and refresh rate targets typical of high-end gaming in 2012.
Having better-than-4090 performance trickle down to a more mainstream price point of $300-400 is going to take at least two more generations of GPU hardware improvements even with the most optimistic expectations for Moore's Law, and that's the minimum necessary to do path tracing well at a modest resolution on a game that will be approaching a decade old by then. It'll take another hardware generation for that level of performance to fit in the price and power budgets of consoles and laptops.
And in 7-10 years when the software stack is matured, we'll be thanking ourselves for doing this in hardware the right way. I don't understand why planning for the future is considered so wasteful - this is an architecture Apple can re-use for future hardware and scale to larger GPUs. Maybe it doesn't make sense for Macs today, but in 5 years that may no longer be the case. Now people don't have to throw away a perfectly good computer made in these twilight years of Moore's law.
For non-games applications like Blender or Cinema4D, having hardware-accelerated ray tracing and denoising is already a game-changer. Instead of switching between preview and render layers, you can interact with a production-quality render in real time. Materials are properly emissive and transmissive, PBR and normal maps composite naturally instead of needing different settings, and you can count the time it takes before getting an acceptable frame in milliseconds, not minutes.
I don't often give Apple the benefit of the doubt, but hardware-accelerated ray tracing is a no-brainer here. If they aren't going to abandon Metal, and they intend to maintain their minuscule foothold in PC gaming, they have to lay the groundwork for future titles to get developed on. They have the hardware investment, they have the capital to invest in their software, and their competitors like Khronos (apparently) and Microsoft both had ray tracing APIs for years when Apple finally released theirs.
So I guess it's just a "gimmick" in that relatively few games properly take advantage of this currently, rather than the effect not being good enough.
Unfortunately most people’s experience with raytracing is turning it on for a game that was not designed for it, but it was added through a patch, which results in worse lighting. Why? Because the rasterized image includes baked-in global illumination using more light sources than whatever was hastily put together for the raytracing patch.
WoW Burning Crusade launched in *2006* originally. The "Classic" re-release of the game uses the modern engine but with the original game art assets and content.
Does it do anything in the 'modern' WoW game? Probably! In Classic though all it did was tank my framerate.
Since then I also played the unimaginable disaster that was Cyberpunk 2077. For as "pretty" as I suppose the game looked I can't exactly say if the ray tracing improved anything
If you want to see what raytracing can do, I'd only look at very, very recent UE5 titles that are designed for raytracing from the ground-up.
Ray tracing is also extremely heavily marketed, and at a time when GPU upgrades have become infrequent for most people due to extremely high prices and relatively weak overall performance gains year over year.
The industry is adopting ray tracing because they need to be able to offer something new when the overall performance gains generation over generation have been slowing for years. They've been leveraging marketing hard to try to generate demand for upgrades among gamers, knowing cryptocurrency won't buoy them forever.
That ray tracing is cited as a reason among gamers who do upgrade their GPUs is unsurprising and not really a strong indicator that ray tracing is a great feature.
At any rate, both the gaming industry and the wider tech industry are known to be extremely faddish at times. So is consumer behavior. Things 'the whole industry is doing' has always been a category that includes many gimmicks.
Personally I think it’s useful for a few things, but it’s not the giant game changer I think they want you to think it is.
Raytraced reflections are a very nice improvement. Using it for global illumination and shadows is also a very good improvement.
But it’s not exactly what the move to multi texturing was, or the first GPUs. Or shaders.
However, it is important to put things in context. Something can be a 'Gimmick' on several year old integrated mobile hardware that can't run most games at a reasonable FPS without it; and not a 'Gimmick' on cutting edge space heaters.
It's not "just math", it's data structures and algorithms for tree traversal, with a focus on memory cache hardware friendliness.
The math part is trivial. It's the memory part that's hard.
Ray tracing hardware and acceleration structures are highly specific to ray tracing and not really usable for other kinds of spatial queries. That said, ray tracing has applications outside of computer graphics. Medical imaging for example.
The other parts of ray tracing like shading and so on, are usually just done on the general compute.
The problem with doing so, though, and with GPU physics in general is that it's too high latency to incorporate effectively into a typical game loop. It'll work fine for things that don't impact the world, like particle simulations or hair/cloth physics, but for anything interactive the latency cost tends to kill it. That and also the GPU is usually the visual bottleneck anyway so having it spend power on stuff the half-idle CPU could do adequately isn't a good use of resources.
The faster your fps, the more flickery this ends up looking as you're constantly pulling back the camera or player or whatever a frame after it collided. The lower the fps, the more sluggish and unresponsive it feels.
Alternatively you need to pipeline your entire world state and now you've got some pretty bad input latency
Ray tracing is, by comparison, the holy grail of all realtime lighting effects. Global illumination makes the current raster lighting techniques look primitive by comparison. It is not an exaggeration to say that realtime graphics research largely revolves around using hacks to imitate a fraction of ray tracing's power. They are piling on pipeline-after-pipeline for ambient occlusion, realtime reflections and shadowing, bloom and glare as well as god rays and screenspace/volumetric effects. These are all things you don't have to hack together when your scene is already path tracing the environment with the physical properties accounted for. Instead of stacking hacks, you have a coherent pipeline that can be denoised, antialiased, upscaled and post-processed in one pass. No shadowmaps, no baked lighting, all realtime.
There is a reason why even Apple quit dragging their feet here - modern real-time graphics are the gimmick, ray tracing is the production-quality alternative.
Path tracing is the gold standard for computer graphics. It is a physically based rendering model that is based on how lighting actually works. There are degrees of path tracing of varying quality, but there is nothing else that is better from a visual quality and accuracy standpoint.
Your modern AAA title does a massive amount of impressive hacks to get rasterization into the uncanny valley, as rasterization has nothing to do with how photons work. That can all be thrown out and replaced with “model photons interacting with the scene” if the path tracing hardware was powerful enough. It’d be simpler and perfectly accurate. The end result would not live in the uncanny valley, but would be indistinguishable from reality.
Assuming the hardware was fast enough. But we’ll get there.
Why waste computing power on 'physically correct' algorithms, when the 'cheap hacks' can do so much more in less time, while producing nearly the same result.
Accelerating ray tracing in-hardware is a literal no-brainer unless you deliberately want to ostracize game developers and animators on Mac. I understand the reactionary "But I don't care about dynamic shadows!" opinion, but there's practically no opportunity cost here. If you want to use traditional lighting techniques, you can still render it on an RT-enabled GPU. You just also have the option of not wanting to pull out your fingernails when rendering a preview in Blender.
The other question is how much of the raytracing features in 3D APIs need to be implemented in fixed-function hardware units, or whether this is just another area where the pendulum will swing back and forth between hardware and software (running on the GPU of course).
But then maybe in 10 years we'll have 'signed distance field units' in GPUs and nobody talks about raytracing anymore ;)
The architecture will probably improve on both Nvidia and Apple's side going forward, but in theory both GPUs should be easier to support for longer since they're not focused on accelerating obsolete junk like MSAA or HBAO. It enables a better convergence of features, it makes porting to-and-from Mac easier, and with any luck Apple might even quit being so sheepish about working with Khronos since they're not actively neglecting the Vulkan featureset anymore.
You can scale these same principles to even less photorealistic games like the Borderlands series or a Grand Theft Auto game. Ray tracing is less about photorealism (although it is a potent side effect) and more about creating dynamic lighting conditions for an interactive scene. By simulating the behavior of light, you get realistic lighting - photoreal or not a lot of games rely on SSR and shadowmaps that can be replaced with realtime RT.
As long as traditional lighting is enough (and given that it has for the last 2 decades or so), RT remains a gimmick.
In any case, RT isn't just about getting pretty graphics. It massively lowers the artists' workload since there's no need to painstakingly go through each in-game area and add fake lights to make everything look good.
No gaming studio will pass up on the opportunity to get better graphics and better productivity. It really is just a matter of waiting a few years for the hardware to get good enough.
Yes, because "Rendering light the exact same way reality itself does it" was never the assignment, outside of nvidia desperately trying to find excuses to sell more GPUs.
Maybe some games would benefit from it in some cases... but you have to weigh that marginal improvement against the increased costs, both economic and ecological.
> It massively lowers the artists' workload since there's no need to painstakingly go through each in-game area and add fake lights to make everything look good.
This is a laughable claim, as long as you're going for anything more than fixed ambient lighting you're going to need to massage and QA that the lighting works for what you're trying to show.
---
In short, yes. Ray tracing as a headline feature is a gimmick, made to appeal to the same clueless HNers who think AI will eliminate our need to understand anything or express ourselves.
I guess I can't blame HN for courting pedestrian takes, but man you're going to be disappointed by Apple's roadmap going forward if this is your opinion. And I say this, defending Apple, as someone that treats Tim Cook and Steve Jobs as the living and buried devil respectively. Having hardware-accelerated ray tracing is no more of a "gamer" feature than the high-impedance headphone jack is an "audiophile" feature. It is intelligent design motivated by a desire to accommodate a user's potential use-case. Removing either would be a net-negative at this point.