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.

 

[CapitalsCupReality]

All this hardware talk has got me thinking about a minimally viable gaming desktop to replace my current PC that won’t support Windows 11.

Thoughts on these specs as a backup gaming/daily use PC?

That’s the base level Alienware. Also going to check similarly specced on CyberPowerPC as it’s been recommended here by others.

Alienware Aurora R16 Gaming Desktop​

Model: R16
4.6 (4527)

$1,499.99
Dell Price
$1,299.99

Price Match Guarantee

• 
  
  13th Gen Intel® Core™ i9-13900F (68MB, 24 cores, 32 threads, up to 5.60 GHz P-Core Thermal Velocity)
• 
  
  Windows 11 Home, English, French, Spanish
  (Dell Technologies recommends Windows 11 Pro for business)
• 
  
  NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4060, 8 GB GDDR6
• 
  
  16 GB, 2 x 8 GB, DDR5, 5600 MT/s
• 
  
  1 TB, M.2, PCIe NVMe, SSD
• 
  
  500W Platinum Rated PSU, Air-Cooled CPU & Solid Side Panel
• 
  
  Ports & slots

 

[Drake1588]

Alienware will overcharge you and probably have poor airflow. I think that at $1500, you should be able to get a pre-built with RTX 4070 or maybe even a 4070 Ti from most dealers.

Here are some good examples on Newegg, flagged with 4070, 4070 Super, 4070 Ti, or 4070 Ti Super graphics cards.

https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100897449%20601413441%20601432216%20601432181%20601411321

Others can give you better Radeon GPU comparables than I could, but the gaming jump from 4060 to 4070 is considerable.

 

[CapitalsCupReality]

Thx man!

 

[Drake1588]

I've also used CyberPowerPC before and they're not bad. Others here have as well.

Pre-builts can sometimes get a bad rap from those of us who build our own. Companies sometimes let you choose certain components and then maybe cheap out on the ones they don't mention, to shave their margins. Yet not everyone is up for building their own PC from parts, and that's totally fair. Alienware has a cool factor, especially for laptops, that I think has merit. It's not as rosy for desktops, though. Alienware desktops cost too much for the same guts and they constrict airflow to design a case that isn't boxy or mesh. Parts can cook inside and today's CPUs run hot.

For gaming, you really want to focus on the best graphics card you can afford on your budget. It could be worth learning as much as you can about AMD Radeon cards, because I think AMD is giving people a somewhat better deal these days. Not amazing, but better value than nVidia if ray tracing isn't super important to you.

If you can wait 4-6 weeks, the RTX 5070s will be out. Then you can decide between a new and shiny card or rebated cards in the 40xxx series because they're trying to clear out inventory for the new ones.

 

[Jags]

Great advice. The only thing I'd add is that your intended gaming resolution matters a lot. If you're still on 1080p, you can stick with the NVIDIA xx60 cards and save yourself quite a bit of cash. The newest Intel cards are getting rave reviews and are a tremendous value in this tier.

If you're at 1440p, then you want to be in that xx70 echelon for sure. In these two resolution categories, the AMD and equivalents are great values. NVIDIA is key for ray tracing and breakneck local AI tasks, but if you're not doing those things you don't really lose anything by going with a more cost effective alternative.

If you're trying to game at 4K, you want the xx80 and up. And once you're in this tier, with AMD moving away from it (at least for now while they try to gain market share), NVIDIA is really where you want to be, in my opinion.

The caveat to all of this is upscaling and frame generation. The next iteration is always right around the corner, and the current FSR and DLSS standards really do a great job in most titles that support them. There's also Lossless Scaling now -- software that you run to drastically increase FPS in gaming. It's still developing, but it generally works very well and costs like eight bucks.

So you can break the above "Resolution to Model #" guidelines if you're comfortable using those options. We're in that sweet spot now where if the titles you play are old enough to not support upscaling or framegen, a new gaming GPU will handle them fine regardless.

Drake's 100% right about GPU importance, but your resolution and utilization of upscaling/framegen allow for much more freedom in the money you spend on one and how long it'll be viable. It's a whole new world from that perspective.

On the CPU side you've got all the leeway you want. AMD is still making AM4 viable and the prices are very good. The newest motherboard architecture innovations are generally years ahead of today's hardware standards, so you're not leaving much performance on the table at all, if any, unless you really need productivity performance way above gaming demands. If gaming is this machine's primary thing, you can spend less than $200 on a processor without worries.

 

[CapitalsCupReality]

great stuff all thank you. My main gaming is on an Alienware laptop with a 4080. It cooks.

This is more gaming backup, daily use. Want something I can limp along if the main ever goes down.


Also noticed the Alienware desktop cases are more traditional design now…

 

[CapitalsCupReality]

I've also used CyberPowerPC before and they're not bad. Others here have as well.

Pre-builts can sometimes get a bad rap from those of us who build our own. Companies sometimes let you choose certain components and then maybe cheap out on the ones they don't mention, to shave their margins. Yet not everyone is up for building their own PC from parts, and that's totally fair. Alienware has a cool factor, especially for laptops, that I think has merit. It's not as rosy for desktops, though. Alienware desktops cost too much for the same guts and they constrict airflow to design a case that isn't boxy or mesh. Parts can cook inside and today's CPUs run hot.

For gaming, you really want to focus on the best graphics card you can afford on your budget. It could be worth learning as much as you can about AMD Radeon cards, because I think AMD is giving people a somewhat better deal these days. Not amazing, but better value than nVidia if ray tracing isn't super important to you.

If you can wait 4-6 weeks, the RTX 5070s will be out. Then you can decide between a new and shiny card or rebated cards in the 40xxx series because they're trying to clear out inventory for the new ones.

The thought of my future setup being my current AW laptop with the AW 34, combined with this desktop and a second 34 to go with it, does indeed seem like a cool aesthetic….in the House Harkonnen/Dune theme lol….

 

[Drake1588]

Something to check with newer cases is if they are 'hiding away' mesh openings. It used to be that either mesh was full frontal, and that if there wasn't mesh at the front of the case, then airflow sucked. Then companies started coming out with cases with hidden mesh openings on the bottom (viable if the case has 1" feet to intake air through the bottom), or mesh on the side to intake through a radiator that way (e.g., Lian Li 011 dynamic). I'm not sure how Alienware is trying to do it these days, but it would make sense if they went back to the drawing board. As of a couple of years ago, their design choices sucked for practicality/functionality and were entirely about looks. Maybe check out a review or two of the cooling performance for some Alienware models you are looking at, because today's chips can get up to 95°C... Granted, that is probably not as much of a problem in a system capped at $1500.

Jags is right; I was thinking that 1440p is the sweet spot right now for affordable gaming. If gaming at 1080p, though, a RTX 4060 is fine. Hell, a RTX 2080 is fine.

DLSS and FSR frame generation technologies are indeed getting really good and I'm not above using them lightly myself, on really good hardware. It makes a ton of sense to use it on mid-range hardware on demanding games and figure out your tolerance for it. That's one reason to maybe see what the early PCs with 5070s look like, because they will be able to make use of DLSS 4.0, which nVidia ties to the hardware itself (AMD's FSR is purely software and is backwards compatible on multiple generations of their graphics cards).

For laptops, I'm a big fan of the Lenovo Legion 7 and 7 Pro series right now. They look great, and perform very well.

 

[Drake1588]

Something I've always thought is that the tactile experience is with your laptop itself. You're going to be using the laptop's keyboard, screen, trackpad... so the fit and feel and polish of the chassis and the keys all matter a good bit more. With a desktop, if it's cheap on the outside, put it out of sight. Your tactile experience is with the peripherals you choose to use with it, and the monitor with which you pair it.

So I sometimes have used a shittier case for a desktop, but usually try to go for a nice laptop chassis. I'm going to have my grubby hands on a laptop. Not so with the desktop itself.

 

[CapitalsCupReality]

Something to check with newer cases is if they are 'hiding away' mesh openings. It used to be that either mesh was full frontal, and that if there wasn't mesh at the front of the case, then airflow sucked. Then companies started coming out with cases with hidden mesh openings on the bottom (viable if the case has 1" feet to intake air through the bottom), or mesh on the side to intake through a radiator that way (e.g., Lian Li 011 dynamic). I'm not sure how Alienware is trying to do it these days, but it would make sense if they went back to the drawing board. As of a couple of years ago, their design choices sucked for practicality/functionality and were entirely about looks. Maybe check out a review or two of the cooling performance for some Alienware models you are looking at, because today's chips can get up to 95°C... Granted, that is probably not as much of a problem in a system capped at $1500.

Jags is right; I was thinking that 1440p is the sweet spot right now for affordable gaming. If gaming at 1080p, though, a RTX 4060 is fine. Hell, a RTX 2080 is fine.

DLSS and FSR frame generation technologies are indeed getting really good and I'm not above using them lightly myself, on really good hardware. It makes a ton of sense to use it on mid-range hardware on demanding games and figure out your tolerance for it. That's one reason to maybe see what the early PCs with 5070s look like, because they will be able to make use of DLSS 4.0, which nVidia ties to the hardware itself (AMD's FSR is purely software and is backwards compatible on multiple generations of their graphics cards).

For laptops, I'm a big fan of the Lenovo Legion 7 and 7 Pro series right now. They look great, and perform very well.

If you look at the features tab of that Alienware desktop above, it has a nice air flow diagram….looks better…so maybe that $1299 4060 setup is ok for me then…..I would upgrade memory and storage after market.

 

[usiel]

Have five or six, including my current desktop rig, from cyberpowerpc all the way back to the early 2000s. Only had one issue with a bad motherboard where the PC slots did not work. Did my due diligence on the troubleshooting and called their support after five minutes the dude knew I went through everything and sent me a new one. Never got one of their gaming laptops so an weigh in on those.

Can confirm my Alienware M15 Oled 15" with a 2070 maxq gets steaming hot. Honestly I think the gfx fans are done now they don't come on but have a truly massive laptop cooler, that though loud as all hell as high rpm, can compensate. Ridiculously good deal on the Alienware so won't complain its still working. Have a usb port failure and no more wifi so there is some jank.

 

[Drake1588]

Reviews are out. The RTX 5080 seems to manage power efficiency pretty well (360W). It comes in about 10 degrees cooler at load, as a result. The good news sort of ends there.

It's maybe 22 percent faster in frame performance than the 4080. That card isn't produced today, though. The only thing out there is a 4080 Super today, which shaves the marginal improvement even more. It falls short of the performance of a 4090 (past generation releases would bring the prior generation's xx90 performance to the masses, as the top end leapt forward). It's incremental and not a quantum leap. What does that mean?

• It's objectively an outstanding card. If you don't own a gaming PC, or haven't upgraded in many years, it's going to be a fantastic performer. If you are still using anything up to RTX 30xx, then it's a noticeable improvement (lots of that is owed to a big jump from 30xx to 40xx).
  
  
• It's comparatively a minor upgrade, though, over the equivalent 40xx series card. There's just not enough here to buy a 50xx series GPU if you currently have a 40xx series graphics card, not unless you're leveling up a tier or two (e.g., 4060 to 5080/5090).