DXR Spotlight Contest - UE4 Diode Demo

Hmm....the viewer is asked to check out RT effects but is hit with a fast moving fight scene instead. Not a well-constructed RT demo, imho.

 

Can barely tell it's using raytracing. I doubt anyone would even notice, except the far higher frame-rates if it was turned off.

 

Meh, Control will be the real rt showcase.

 

What about to release new unreal tournament and not only some demos.
I really wish to play this type of game in these days.
And see old ut characters again in new game.

 

Reflections do look nice. The thing is, we haven't seen what a non-RT scenario of the same scenes would look like.

And @Petr V , UT won't come soon, they're busy with Fortnite, and I've read just yesterday that they "wouldn't even know how to finish UT", a quote from Sweeney, but I can't recall where I've read this so I can't give a link, sorry.

 

You always know it's a RT scene because the whole scene is filled with puddles. But even without a single puddle you can maybe notice it has something to do with RT, because a RT scene is always a WAY too dark.
Thinking of that, than RT is a pure waste of time and money and it make things look more unreal as with RZ. I don't get it why so "many" pp say, with RT the games look better? Till today I never saw a game looking better (over all) with RT in direct comparsion with a "normal" game. An inside scenes is always a way too dark and the outside is too "washy" (scene on distance). So why should I accept a Performance decrase for a more worse looking game? I don't get that!

 

Needs more work. Not real Raytracing. 1/2 of weapon effects are not reflected (Like huge circle at 0:13~0:14).
And most of weapon effects do not even illuminate area around.

 

Ribbons and meshes in Niagara are not supported yet - only sprites.

 

The moments I realise I'm a procreating noob when it comes to slightly below surface terms and understandings of 3D rendering. I thought Niagara was a town with famous waterfalls I've been to three times already...

 

Lol - it's that too, but it's also Epic's name for it's new particle VFX tool inside Unreal Engine. The previous one was called Cascade - which is a small waterfall so I guess they wanted to stick with the waterfall thing.

Cascade doesn't support DXR at all - Niagara has some support but it's still limited.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US...racing/index.html#raytracingsupportedfeatures

There are a bunch of effects and various features yet to be supported - which is why you see some things not being properly drawn in a lot of these demos. It probably takes a decent amount of time to switch them over - account for issues - Q/A testing on it - building it in a way that they can maintain a fork for raster/RT and add features to both going forward. They probably are also prioritizing things useful for film/architectural as they are heavily pushing into that market. Real time performance (60+fps) and advanced particle effects you'd find on weapons shooting doesn't matter as much when you're just demoing a house/building for a client or whatever. Unless you're simulating some kind of firefight in nakatomi plaza.

 

Well there has been a Die Hard game with Nakatomi Plaza before, but I'm almost certain it did not support any way of RT

Thanks for the explaination and read up. You continue to teach those who humbly admit they know nothing. Kudos.

 

They are having hard time with RTX.
I wonder what they will do in next gen graphics.
If rt cores cannot grow fast, are they holding back normal shaders power to avoid big perf differences with rtx on/off?
Will ati that is not playing with RT cores get better results?

Unless some major game comes out in august, we are a 3 games with rtx after 1 year from launch ( that is september ). This is really bad.

 

I don't know why you think AMD isn't playing with dedicated RT hardware - the only thing they seem to be doing differently (from the patents) is fetch/store from texture units instead of the dedicated hardware - the collision calcs are still dedicated hardware.

I agree that there are few games but more are coming relatively soon. Wolfenstein Youngblood is getting it, the new Doom is getting it, Control and COD. They should have had more games and the ones that are launching without it should have launched with it. DLSS is in a similar state.

 

Im not very impressed with Ray trace in general, its heavy, and its marginally better than a scene illuminated by a good artist on a rasterized engine, and while reflections are nice, how many parts of the world are reflective like a mirror? not many, in nature almost none apart from water and I though we had that pretty much covered already in modern games, I think that most developers that rejoice with RT are the lazy ones that prefer to let the engine take care of the illumination instead of you placing the lights in a strategic way to get the best results.

 

So much pessimism.

Raytracing can be great, the problem is how people are implementing it. Raytracing is the difference between a highly detailed scene and a realistic-looking scene. The reason that hasn't happened yet is because all of the demos are over-emphasizing shiny things (particularly flat shiny things, which you don't need fancy RT for at all). So, it just leaves people to believe that shiny things are all RT is good for, which it isn't.

Take this image for example:

Notice how there's nothing shiny in this scene, but RT plays a pivotal role here. Notice the the sides of the balls are slightly colored, because of the painted walls. You'll also see how they affect the shadows on the walls, even though the light source is only directly above them.
If you or the balls move around, the reflected colors have to change, so you can't always pre-render their appearance. So if you stood between the ball on the right and the blue wall, the ball shouldn't still appear blue, because you should be blocking much of the reflected blue light. If the game were especially realistic, you could wave your hand in front of the ball, and there should be a faint skin-colored "glow" on the surface of the ball.

That's what RT is important for. Unfortunately, such details are way too subtle to convince anyone that it's well-worth it, so devs use surfaces that are obnoxiously glossy.

EDIT:
As for games with pre-rendered scenes that look hyper-realistic: those look so realistic because of ray tracing. The only difference is it's not processed live.

 

Almost all the raytracing demos i have seem do the same, make the games look like bioshock 1, with the floor full of pools of water

 

Hi everyone, I'm the creator...and longtime lurker on here. Wanted to give context to what this is. This is a prototype for a game I'm working in my free time as a solo developer. This video was made as an entry to win a Titan RTX. I'm hoping to have the game in early access, late 2020.

As a developer I am just getting my hands on ray tracing and its very much in it's early form but I'm just happy its finally part of the conversation for video games. There are still a lot of features not supported (as mentioned in an earlier comment) and some features that are for the time being costly to the frame rate. The thing that is hard to illustrate, is how fast engines like UE4 optimize these features to make this stuff more usable and get it into the hands of players.

The video shows last months build. After the latest 4.23 preview build for UE4 came out, I saw a 10 ms speed increase on ray tracing. When I started this demo, ray tracing features had to be tweaked in command lines and now its fully integrated into the post process volumes. The tech is new and I understand everyone's frustrations that there aren't more games using it in spectacular ways but as developers get acclimated to what they can do with it and engineers find ways to optimize it (which they always do) We are going to see some really mind blowing stuff very soon as the tech matures.

This is running at 30-40 fps @ 1080p on a 2080 TI It's using Ray Tracing for ambient occlusion, shadows, and reflections.

A new build for Diode will be available later this month so please stay tuned to my youtube channel for updates and free download links. Also these demos are all very playable without ray tracing. There is an executable included that will launch the regular game so people without RTX cards can still get down .