Raytracing in ED for everyone!

[amadeus1171]

Hi guys!

Your favorite forum commentator here.

NVidia's new driver supports Raytracing for the GTX1060 and up, and AMD's upcoming Navi 10 and 20 cards are supposed to support raytracing.

Do you think raytracing would be worth it to have raytracing in Elite Dangerous?

Sure, the FPS would be horrendous for gameplay, but for screenshots and scenes that are not that involved, we could get some really pretty scenes. And having raytracing implemented now we would at least get exposure to what Elite: Dangerous should look like in raytracing.

What do you think?

 

[Noddie]

No, not really, Raytracing strikes me as a bit pointless. It was something people raved over back in the days of the Amiga.

In a video game you can get something "good enough" in other ways that require far, far less power. There are other things you could do with the computational horsepower needed to carry it out that would confer more benefit than raytracing will. It's a gimmick.

This may explain why virtually nobody has picked it up. Not worth the FPS-Hit and for those people who have the cards, there are better ways to spent the pixels.

 

[Morbad]

Worth it in what sense?

Using ray tracing for shadows alone would be a vast improvement over the current CSMs and it won't be long before ray traced global illumination is viable at a relatively modest performance hit...which would could solve pretty much all the lighting issues in the game, if implemented well.

Is it worth it for Frontier to move the Cobra engine from D3D11 to D3D12 or Vulkan and completely overhaul the lighting system for these improvements? Probably not.

 

[Old Duck]

PS5 also supports ray tracing. Would RT finally make is feasible for ED to support multiple light sources (stars and planetshine)? If so, then a big YES PLEASE.

I'm also guessing it would cure EBL

 

[babelfisch]

I am not sure if raytracing has a future. So far the comparisions I've seen are all very underwhelming, sometimes I can't even see a difference. Which is not good for a feature that costs so much performance. I've heard that the next console generation comes with raytracing support so I could be wrong there.

 

[CMDR Cosmic Spacehead]

I still can't tell the difference... Lol

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Hi guys!

Your favorite forum commentator here.

NVidia's new driver supports Raytracing for the GTX1060 and up, and AMD's upcoming Navi 10 and 20 cards are supposed to support raytracing.

Do you think raytracing would be worth it to have raytracing in Elite Dangerous?

Sure, the FPS would be horrendous for gameplay, but for screenshots and scenes that are not that involved, we could get some really pretty scenes. And having raytracing implemented now we would at least get exposure to what Elite: Dangerous should look like in raytracing.

What do you think?

Sub 20fps with my 1080ti? No thanks.
Raytracing imo IS the future for game lighting but I think I will wait for at least the next generation of gpu to buy in. Would be nice to see some shots from folk here if it ever gets added however.

The beauty of ray tracing is when supported developers as I understand it can just turn it on and let the hardware do its job rather than have to jump through hoops faking it (which in a game like elite will constantly look better in some places than others because it is a fudge)
However the hardware is not quite there yet even the 2080ti

 

[Patrick_68000]

I still can't tell the difference... Lol

This is often the case in many areas of computing.

 

[Robert Maynard]

What do you think?

At this time, it'd probably be a waste of effort - as I strongly suspect that relatively few players own a 20xx series card; some more will own an nVidia card capable of running RTX atrociously and a not insignificant number of players will own an AMD card and get no benefit from the development.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Actually I suspect high end AMD owners may benefit more that even high end non RTX owners. Vega and Radeon VII crush Pascal when it comes to raw compute as I understand it. (Hence why that Vega 56 does a canny job in that UE 4 raytracing demo

 

[Noddie]

If I'm honest I find this about a lot of gaming. take the difference between high and ultra settings - in most games it's barely noticeable. Especially on smaller screens and lower resolutions. I've played quite a few games at 120+fps but, honestly, anything over 60 to 70 usually seems fine to me and I notice little difference beyond that. I think a lot of the time people just pay to brag.

I fire up the half life series quite a lot. laugh at the graphics, but 2 minutes into it and I'm having too much fun to even notice. I'm not sure graphics actually matter that much. they are just highly marketable.

 

[babelfisch]

I still can't tell the difference... Lol

In some cases the differences are quite obvious, in other cases it barely exists. There are some BF5 videos where I believe the developer deliberately made RT look better than RT off. There is for example a video with a flamethrower that gets some nice reflections in nearby windows. With RT off the flamethrower doesn't have an effect on the environment at all, no lighting, no reflections no nothing. Sure, it looks way better with RT on but that's because the developer chose to not use any effect with RT off which just stinks like artificially boosting sales and a sack of money from Nvidia. Could be too much tinfoil as well though.

 

[Old Duck]

I am not sure if raytracing has a future. So far the comparisions I've seen are all very underwhelming, sometimes I can't even see a difference. Which is not good for a feature that costs so much performance. I've heard that the next console generation comes with raytracing support so I could be wrong there.

I disagree with you, because once hardware can handle real-time raytracing, it will be much easier for developers to implement shadows without all the tricks they currently need to do. You just place your light sources and define your materials, and lighting, shadows, reflections are all handled for you.

My experience is based on using raytracing rendering software to create photorealistic scenes from 3D models, which can require hours if not days for a single image depending the workstation I was using, so my assumption is that this new raytracing hardware does the same basic thing but in silicon rather than software. If I'm wrong, I know somebody will correct me, LOL.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

I think it was said somewhere that although raytracing would be enabled for 10 series cards, without actual raytracing cores like on the RTX cards like the 1060 would manage something abysmal like 10 rays per second.

This is more of a ploy to sell more RTX cards than enabling a feature. You'll see hiw badly your GTX card does raytracing and think "wow I better upgrade".

 

[Jaggedmallard]

I am not sure if raytracing has a future. So far the comparisions I've seen are all very underwhelming, sometimes I can't even see a difference. Which is not good for a feature that costs so much performance. I've heard that the next console generation comes with raytracing support so I could be wrong there.

Most visually impressive games now that don't use raytracing use pre-baked lighting which is significantly less intensive and almost as good at the cost of being severely limited with how dynamic you can make your light sources. You only really see a difference in games like the new Metro that want to use multiple dynamic light sources, a day/night cycle while still looking visually impressive.

But even without it you can still get pretty looking games with dynamic light sources, just not to the level that raytracing allows. Maybe it'll be worth it in another 10 years like all new fancy graphics tech.

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

One massive benefit would global illuminance, but I don't think today's hardware and even next years is up to the challenge to run Elite Dangerous at a decent frame rate.

 

[Mole HD]

I'm tempted to try Metro Exodus with the new drivers and see what kind of slideshow it drags from my 1080ti...

 

[Globusdiablo]

Hi guys!

Your favorite forum commentator here.

NVidia's new driver supports Raytracing for the GTX1060 and up, and AMD's upcoming Navi 10 and 20 cards are supposed to support raytracing.

Do you think raytracing would be worth it to have raytracing in Elite Dangerous?

Sure, the FPS would be horrendous for gameplay, but for screenshots and scenes that are not that involved, we could get some really pretty scenes. And having raytracing implemented now we would at least get exposure to what Elite: Dangerous should look like in raytracing.

What do you think?

What's not to like?

 

[Deleted member 110222]

I'm tempted to try Metro Exodus with the new drivers and see what kind of slideshow it drags from my 1080ti...

Obviously I should do the same for my 1060 for that sweet sweet 5FPS.

Well I would if it weren't for Epic Spyware.

 

[LJITimate]

I dont think it would work in elite. Raytracing works really well (when it's done right) and elite isn't gpu heavy anyway so performance could be acceptable. However, elite has a lot of volumetric effects, fog etc, and that is extremely difficult to render quickly with raytracing. Also it would take a lot of effort to implement and there are other priorities that the dev team should focus on.

Also, nvidia never expected rtx to work on gtx cards. The reason they added support was to show how much better the new cards are. So don't judge rtx by your gtx performance