Conflicted Thoughts on Portal RTX

[@keystrokecascade]

Honestly this reminds me of VR and Valve; releases one game and a tech demo that have the feature, one super-expensive piece of hardware that actually utilises it, then says "the rest is up to youuuu~" while peaceing out and quietly removing VR tags on Steam

[@E3kHatena]

"The rest is up to you!" I'm not a company that rakes in several million dollars daily being the largest online digital distributor in human history, though

[@keystrokecascade]

@@E3kHatena Tuxedo Mask level shit

[@Mr_Crypt]

I've always found it interesting that people treat ray-tracing like a sovereignty that defines how trendy you are. In most cases, it doesn't make much of a difference- it's just making some objects more shiny, in my opinion. I can't really wrap my head around why some game studios add ray-tracing to their game and re-release it as a 'remastered' game; it's like they are altering its name into a feature that has a value much superior than the stuff that's actually important- such as gameplay, story, characters, etc.

[@E3kHatena]

It's an entirely new render pipeline outside of movies, so the ability to do mathematically accurate lighting without needing to painstakingly bake lights and tune them is appealing to big-name developers; raytracing doesn't care how many lights are in a scene and how many shadows to cast, which is a tremendous boon. The issue is that it's a combination of incredibly niche hardware at the moment and developers not implementing it correctly, leading to infamously greasy/shiny/smooth-looking materials where there should be roughness and texture.

[@Mr_Crypt]

@@E3kHatena 100% agree with everything you said. Ray-tracing is not meant to be implemented into like half the games it's in, but y'know it's money for them so why not!

[@gwen3504]

Worth noting that RE Village doesn’t actually have ray tracing beyond ultra low-res reflections on some materials. RT was shoehorned in. The path-tracing in PwRTX is really impressive, and I wasn’t surprised by how ludicrously demanding it was. Real-time path traced lighting, reflections, occlusion, and so on are EXTREMELY expensive visual effects. PwRTX is more or less a “proof of concept” of what’s possible with RTX Remix then, not unlike Quake II RTX from a few years back.

[@doctorunicorn5550]

ultimately, the problem with the consumer pc (and smartphone) industry is that the personal computer is a solved problem. it's not the '90s anymore. you don't need to buy a new pc every year. (and it's not the 2010s - you don't need to buy a new smartphone every year either.) the cheapest computers out there are simply good enough nowadays, and they remain good enough for far longer than before. like, the 8800 gtx came out in 2006. this is what launched cuda. this is what launched easy gpgpu computing. it's the first modern graphics card. just four years later, nvidia launched the gtx 580, which was about 150% faster. meanwhile in the modern day, nvidia launched the rtx 2080 ti four years ago, and the only way to see those same kinds of performance gains is at 4k; at lower resolutions the rtx 4090 is only 50% faster than the rtx 2080 ti. the problem there is that the rtx 2080 ti today is still good in a way that the 8800 gtx was not back in 2010. but there's another catch: price. the 8800 gtx launched at $650 and the gtx 580 launched at $500 a few years later. nvidia's flagship tier had come down in price. but the 2080 ti launched at $1200 (already significantly more expensive than recent prior generations) while the rtx 4090 just launched for $1600 and has a street price well beyond that. that's partly the plague, partly the market, partly fake libertarian money driving demand, but also the technology. in the past, tsmc would offer bulk discounts to buyers who got lots of wafers fabbed, but now they're auctioning off every wafer to the highest bidder. in addition, it's becoming more and more difficult for tsmc to make denser process nodes. nvidia is having a tougher time than ever designing new microarchitectures because the microarchitectures are bigger, denser, and more complex than ever before. the semiconductor industry has reached a point where cost for a unit of performance has stagnated, and software is getting more demanding at a slower rate than before, and maybe i'm just jaded but a lot of the most demanding aaa titles don't seem that interesting to me anymore. i'll upgrade my 750 ti eventually but for the time being it's fine for what i need it to do, and the fact that i can say that about an 8 year old entry level graphics card is impressive. and as disappointing as it is for me as a burned out former enthusiast, it's better this way. it's better to not have to feel like you have to buy the newest, shiniest gadget every year. i don't want a graphics card to be an aspirational purchase i'm enthusiastic about; i want it to be an appliance that does 3d rendering and accelerates various tasks for me. i don't want to hear about the new ferrari's horsepower; i want to hear about the new prius's trunk space.

[@27klickslegend]

It depends on the game, minecraft with raytracing lets you do so many things that would not be possible otherwise, you can make cool stuff like pinhole projectors with RTX enabled

[@akellerseattle]

Seriously, of all games to get me to buy Nvidia over AMD, it was Minecraft. My girlfriend and I have a creative world on PS4 we've been building for the last few years, and I finally shelled out 8 dollars to Microsoft to make a realm and import the world to my PC. What a fucking difference. I swear RT brings such a new dimension to builds, especially with emissives like end rods.

[@midge_gender_solek3314]

Most effects in Portal RTX such as particle lighting, subsurface scattering, increased portal fidelity, glass refractions, proper shiny surfaces not based on primitive cubemaps, and such, can be implemented without RTX, run way better and be more accessible on different GPUs. 2kliksphilip has a video where he modified HL2 the same way, and you can easily see (apart from broken stuff) raytracing doesn't improve quality on its own, it requires a lot of work to adapt something to make use of it

[@TheFuri0uswc]

I think games like minecraft benefits from ray tracing the most. The game just looks so much better with it and you can use to make your builds more creative

[@FatheredPuma81]

What mod are you using?

[@E3kHatena]

It’s literally just the one Nvidia put on Steam?

[@FatheredPuma81]

​@@E3kHatena Ah nevermind it's a Bonus map. Test Chamber 14 Advanced. Thought it was a mod lol.

[@E3kHatena]

@@FatheredPuma81 Oh yeah, some of the footage is with the alternate password cubes and in the advanced chambers, that’d definitely throw a wrench into things!

[@gavingavingavin]

The excitement from the portal RTX demo is not only the fact that it's raytracing and it's pretty, but it's the fact that in a few simple (relative to any prior solutions) steps, we can update any fixed function pipeline game's lighting and assets. It's the same excitement that drives emulator improvements and graphics mods for 20 year old games. I get that you're not impressed with the performance on your hardware, but you're getting something very similar to MOVIE LEVEL RENDERING in real time. Rasterized games may look good enough for you (and many do look good), but you kinda sound like the people who thought graphics couldn't get any better than Crysis. If your critique boils down to "I don't think this is the right marketing strategy for Nvidia" then fine, but it sure as hell provides a lot of value to modding communities.

[@E3kHatena]

But my take is pushing that sort of task, of building all these high-res PBR materials and doing all these tweaks onto the consumer means that as per Sturgeon’s Law, the vast majority of the RTX Remix projects are going to poorly sell the rendering tech to people *STILL* on the fence after both this and Quake 2. I may have botched the execution (I felt just as conflicted with this script as I did PRTX), and while I did mention film CGI within the script, I didn’t like my wording and cut the aside at the last minute.

[@gavingavingavin]

@@E3kHatena I respect your take, and appreciate the reply, but still disagree. Rtx remix is supposed to have some tools that automatically upscale textures and apply pbr properties to them (we'll see how good it works) and there are already people jerry rigging other games to work with portal RTX, and it's going pretty well. Prior to this, in order to update a game's lighting and textures you had to be pretty familiar with the engine and implementation. Now, you can almost do nothing and it will look better, or you can focus your work into the artistic side of texturing/material work and make something look fantastic with care. Again, we'll have to see how the tech shakes out, but given that this is another tool in the tool belt of modders made by a hardware company and not a top-down AAA change taking man hours away from other projects, I don't see what the issue is.

[@RecomALT]

what gpu do you have

[@E3kHatena]

A 3070.

[@ReidArt]

oh nooo it looks. very chuggy ! a very well worded explanation of how this all works, tbh- I didnt understand RTX in the slightest before this video

[@E3kHatena]

With OBS closed, I was managing 30-40 FPS on a 3070 with DLSS set to performance. I could set it higher and get 60 frames, but the artifacts were VERY noticeable and VERY distracting.

[@akellerseattle]

@@E3kHatena what resolution? I played at 1080p with Ultra/DLSS auto and had a very playable experience. 60-70 usually with pretty regular drops into the 40s, but nothing crazy edit: also running a 3070

[@E3kHatena]

@akellerseattle - First playthrough at 1440p and performance DLSS. Second one with OBS open was at 1080p while trying a few different denoising and AA solutions. I probably should take some time to try the game at 1080p windowed with OBS not open; I think a sole 1080p display is still the top monitor config on the Steam Hardware Survey?

[@yudhaxn1195]

Raytracing is a gimmick in games

[@E3kHatena]

I’d say it could very well have its uses; the lighting engine at play is rather interesting to futz with and having film-style rendering even slightly at a playable rate is quite miraculous. I feel like it hasn’t found its obvious aha moment yet, most definitely because raytracing all lighting is too costly at real-time and raytracing just reflections or shadows is too easy to miss or fake with enough rasterization trickery that it feels redundant. I’m of the opinion that in a decade’s time, it will have absolutely proven itself, but we’re on board much too early for it to be actually impressive yet.