OT: Video Games VI

[Devil Dancer]

Is there a sense in the enthusiast community about the future of hardware ray tracing?

My understanding is that UE5 offers software alternatives that are pretty good. I'm playing stalker 2 right now and I think it uses those UE5 lighting systems instead of of RT and it looks pretty good.

I wonder what a really top line developer could do with the UE5 stuff if they allocated dev resources to that instead of RT.

 

[Drake1588]

The only properly funny way to answer that question is to let ChatGPT leverage AI resident in the cloud to take a stab at it. So, as to the future of hardware ray tracing:

The future of hardware ray tracing looks bright and promising as the technology continues to evolve and become more accessible. Here's a breakdown of its trajectory and potential impact:

1. Performance Improvements​

• Advances in GPU Design: Companies like NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel are integrating more specialized ray tracing cores into their GPUs, improving performance and efficiency. The balance between rasterization and ray tracing performance will become more optimized.
• Dedicated Hardware Units: Future GPUs and even CPUs may include more dedicated hardware for accelerating ray tracing tasks, such as denoising, BVH traversal, or triangle intersection testing.

2. Broader Adoption​

• Mainstream Gaming: As ray tracing hardware becomes more affordable, it will become a standard feature in mainstream gaming consoles and PCs, allowing developers to fully embrace ray tracing in game design.
• Mobile and Embedded Devices: Advances in power efficiency will enable hardware ray tracing on mobile devices and AR/VR headsets, bringing high-quality rendering to portable platforms.

3. Hybrid Rendering Pipelines​

• Full ray tracing for real-time rendering is still computationally expensive, but hybrid methods (combining rasterization with ray tracing for specific effects like reflections, shadows, and global illumination) will become increasingly common.
• Future innovations in hybrid rendering could make real-time ray tracing feasible for more complex scenes and higher resolutions.

4. Improved Software Ecosystem​

• APIs and Frameworks: APIs like DirectX Raytracing (DXR), Vulkan Ray Tracing, and hardware vendors’ SDKs (e.g., NVIDIA RTX) will mature, enabling easier implementation for developers.
• AI and Machine Learning: AI-based denoising and sampling techniques will continue to complement hardware ray tracing, reducing the computational cost and improving visual fidelity.

5. Applications Beyond Gaming​

• Film and Animation: Real-time ray tracing will revolutionize previsualization and content creation pipelines, offering near-final quality in real time.
• Architecture and Engineering: Ray tracing enables highly accurate simulations of lighting and reflections, benefiting design workflows.
• Scientific Visualization: Improved accuracy and speed in ray-traced rendering can enhance simulations in fields like astrophysics, medicine, and material science.

6. Challenges and Innovations​

• Power Consumption: Ray tracing hardware must become more power-efficient, especially for mobile and portable platforms.
• Scalability: Rendering techniques will need to scale across a variety of hardware, from high-end GPUs to integrated graphics.
• Alternative Techniques: Research into photon mapping, path tracing, and other methods may provide more efficient or visually stunning solutions.

7. Long-Term Goals​

• Fully Realistic Rendering: The ultimate goal is real-time, photorealistic rendering that mimics real-world light physics, potentially making rasterization obsolete.
• Cloud and Remote Rendering: With the rise of cloud gaming and virtualized hardware, ray tracing could be offloaded to powerful remote servers, bringing high-quality visuals to devices with limited local capabilities.

8. Synergy with Other Technologies​

• Ray tracing will complement other trends like AI, virtual production, and the metaverse, where realistic visuals and interactions are critical.

In summary, the future of hardware ray tracing is set to be a game-changer for not only gaming but a wide range of industries, with ongoing advancements making it more accessible, efficient, and versatile.

....and as for the ability of Unreal Engine 5 to serve as a viable alternative to hardware ray tracing...

Unreal Engine 5 offers viable alternatives to ray tracing that enable developers to achieve high-quality lighting and shadow effects without relying on hardware-intensive ray tracing features. Here are some key alternatives and techniques:

1. Lumen (Real-Time Global Illumination and Reflections)​

• Description: Lumen is Unreal Engine 5's fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system, designed to provide realistic lighting without requiring ray tracing hardware.
  • Dynamic global illumination, meaning lighting changes in real-time based on environmental conditions.
  • Screen-space and software-based ray tracing for reflections and indirect lighting.
  • Works efficiently on a wide range of hardware, including consoles like PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, as well as PCs without ray tracing-capable GPUs.
• Use Cases: Ideal for games where dynamic lighting is essential, such as open-world or highly interactive environments.

2. Screen Space Techniques​

• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO):
  
  • Simulates soft shadowing in corners and creases without requiring ray tracing.
  • Provides depth and realism to scenes with minimal computational overhead.
  • Simulates reflections based on what's visible on the screen.
  • A lightweight alternative to ray-traced reflections, though it has limitations (e.g., reflections disappear for objects outside the camera's view).

3. Precomputed Lighting​

• Lightmaps:
  
  • Lighting is baked into textures during development, reducing real-time processing requirements.
  • Works well for static environments where lighting conditions don’t change.
  • Precomputed cubemaps for reflections, ideal for static and semi-dynamic environments.

4. Volumetric and Dynamic Lighting Techniques​

• Volumetric Fog and Lighting:
  
  • Simulates light scattering through the atmosphere for atmospheric effects like fog, clouds, and light shafts.
  • Unreal Engine supports dynamic lights and shadows that do not rely on ray tracing, using shadow maps and other techniques.

5. Hybrid Approaches​

• Unreal Engine 5 allows combining traditional rasterization-based techniques with software ray tracing or lower-quality hardware ray tracing for specific effects like shadows or reflections, striking a balance between performance and visual quality.

Considerations:​

• While these alternatives are powerful, ray tracing remains the most accurate for certain lighting and reflection effects. Developers must weigh the trade-offs between quality, performance, and the target hardware.

In summary, Unreal Engine 5's Lumen system and other rasterization-based techniques provide robust alternatives to ray tracing, making high-quality visuals achievable on a broad range of hardware.