Odyssey and RTX

[Morbad]

Can we get Ray Tracing/RTX support with oddyssey?

Probably not. It would require a new API and a fair bit of extra work on top of that to support a small fraction of the player base.

Also FDev should not waste any ressources on a propretary steppingstone, when there is an open alternative.

Ray tracing isn't proprietary.

what's the history with gfx update and ED?
has something similar happened in the last 6 years and if so what was the uptake from FDev like?

Frontier depreciated the old DX10 client in favor of DX11, which was required for Horizons, in order to simplify their support requirements.

Currently only the 3090 which is in extremely short supply is capable of hitting a barely acceptable level of performance in ray tracing.

This is entirely dependent on how much ray tracing is used, and where.

Plenty of much slower parts can handle limited, but still relevant, degrees of ray tracing, without an undue performance hit.

With consoles lacking RTX/Nvidia you can forget about Fdev programming for Nvidia cards only.. At least I think that that is a bad business decision.

No Direct3D based RTX title is limited NVIDIA for hardware accelerated ray tracing.

 

[Darth Ender]

dx11 was required for horizons because of the shader support needed for procedural terrain rendering of planetary surfaces.

It had nothing to do with simplifying support. It's also what began the deprecation of macos support since the idiots at apple were stuck on an ancient graphics api version that made supporting the same kinds of shaders not feasible.

 

[Morbad]

It had nothing to do with simplifying support.

Dropping the DX10 and Mac clients would most certainly have simplified support.

 

[Darth Ender]

Dropping the DX10 and Mac clients would most certainly have simplified support.

no. it just means that features being added to the game seen as integral were not possible using the older api's and maintaing any playable framerate. Supporting them wasn't an option.

Simplifying support implies the action was done to make things easier. In this case, it was done because the old api's technically couldn't do the job needed by the game anymore.

 

[TheSisko]

Both new consoles are now out. What was Current gen is now Previous gen, and so is Elite. They need to at least update the graphical settings available on the current gen of consoles, or get left behind. Hello Games have updated NMS already of course.

Good point, I think NMS was updated for Xbox Series Consoles on Day 1, or close to it.

 

[Morbad]

Simplifying support implies the action was done to make things easier.

Yes, because that's the primary reason why it was done. Most users had 64-bit DX11 capable hardware, so there was little reason to continue to spend development effort on the older API and clients.

News - Future support for Win 32 and DX10

Hi Everyone, As you know we spend a good deal of time planning for the future, and one issue (and opportunity) we are considering is the effect of supporting Win32 and DX10, and the benefits we would get if we were to drop them. As you know, we support leading edge technology like 4K, 8K, VR...

forums.frontier.co.uk

In this case, it was done because the old api's technically couldn't do the job needed by the game anymore.

What did 3.0-3.7 have that would have been an absolute technical requirement for DX11 for non-Horizons players?

They maintained the 1.x branch through 1.9/2.4. Not even the recent release of Horizons to everyone would have mandated the end of DX10 support for technical reasons, as you can still log into the non-Horizons game. If Frontier wanted to do so they could have kept up the 1.x branch and been on 1.18 by now...but that would have been a lot of extra time, effort, and money, to support less than 2% of the player base.

 

[Koben]

Frontier is already getting an upgrade to Elite's graphics... at the same time there's a lot of people upgrading their whole PCs and they will be looking for new games with ray tracing to play. Timing is just perfect and this is an opportunity FD cannot miss!

People with new video cards will do live streams, make youtube videos... in other words, they will promote the game they are playing and they will play the ray-tracing capable ones.

Elite already looks amazing even without it and branding it with a "RT" seal will only bring more attention and appeal to it. For us with regular PCs, we can always dial a notch on the graphs... no harm there!

Cheers!

 

[Ydiss]

DSLL and the knock-on of TAA for everyone else would do more for Elite's visuals that ray traced reflections at the moment. Maybe when we get shiny cities it'll be a worthwhile thing. There aren't that many surfaces in the game that would really benefit at the moment.

Next gen shadows and global illumination seem more performant when done with techniques other than ray tracing (see the UE5 demo and Demon's Souls).

I'm not really bothered but the point surely is that we will have lots of surfaces to bounce light off in Odyssey?

 

[Cosmo]

You read the Title!
Can we get Ray Tracing/RTX support with oddyssey?

Seconded, ED needs a face-lift.

 

[Rat Catcher]

Does Star Citizen or EVE have ray tracing?
Just asking

 

[CMDR Jayce MacLeod]

It would be wonderful if Elite utilized Raytracing technology in game.... it honestly would seem to be a good fit for a game like this. Maybe one day

 

[Ydiss]

Does Star Citizen or EVE have ray tracing?
Just asking

I doubt it.

Eve would benefit even less from it than Odyssey though. At least in Odyssey there will be quite a lot of FPS content. Just can't see the need for purely space games.

 

[Caydran]

As for general Ray-Tracing, I hope Fdev gets off of MS-DX all-together and Odyssey moves to the Vulkan API, as it now supports RTX.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC3QbGEB5wg


It just makes sense for game developers to move to an open source video API.

 

[Commander Biscuit]

Frontier is already getting an upgrade to Elite's graphics... at the same time there's a lot of people upgrading their whole PCs and they will be looking for new games with ray tracing to play. Timing is just perfect and this is an opportunity FD cannot miss!

I'd rather FD focus on making their game good, than focus on making a game look good for minority of players. CDPR made that mistake, focused on graphics and look where it got them. Odyssey looks great already, and people want it looking better? What for?

 

[StewartScott]

From what seen on YouTube it is Nvidia pushing RTX and pushing developers and everyone else 'into wanting it', while the side by side comparisons so far don't show the justification for the FPS performance drops while having RTX enabled, so there it is for me, I'll be sticking with my GTX 1080 for awhile yet myself until the smoke out there clears.