Gamers Nexus compares traditional faked global illumination techniques with hardware-accelerated RTX ray tracing in Unreal Engine.
This demonstrates traditional graphics techniques vs. RTX by making a fully ray-traced "game" in Unreal Engine, looking at global illumination in part 1.
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Today's content fakes global illumination to illustrate the ups and downs of using RTX. The upside is obvious -- it's easier, allows better dynamic movement of objects while retaining GI, and is theoretically more accurate. The downside is performance, clearly, and noise. Our 100% ray-traced... "game" provides some early demos of DXR's implementation into Unreal Engine, which is presently (at writing) on its third preview build of the DXR implementation. Epic Games still has a lot of work to do on this front, but we can take an advance look at RTX shadows, reflections, global illumination, and more.
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Video: Andrew Coleman
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Why it's here
1 person recommends this
What people say. Recommended as a clear comparison of traditional rasterized global illumination workarounds versus early real-time ray tracing implementations.
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On “An Inside Look at Microsoft’s Newest Flight Simulator”
this extremely interesting video show state of the art techniques used to fake global illumination without using ray-tracing and compares the result with the ray-traced variant link to this video long story short moving object color casting light is the main visible difference that cannot be replicated with traditional techniques (like baking the light reflection in the scene at built time, but can be faked convincingly); ray-tracing is also not limited at reflecting elements that are on the scene like what you'd get from screen space reflection, which is less noticeable of an effect but is there if you pay attention and know what to look for.
My impression from the analyses I've seen so far is that it barely improves the visual quality, since the game designers learned to fake it so well over the last two decades, and it comes at a significant cost to frame rate. In particular, good ray-tracing with acceptable noise levels comes at around 500 rays a point. RTX cards are capable of 2 rays a point. Here is a comparison of the regular global illumination vs RTX real-time raytracing, particularly take look at noise levels generated by RTX in the background. link to this video
On “Quake II RTX: Re-Engineering a Classic with Ray Tracing Effects on Vulkan”
…cts way down and having a smoothing pass. After all that is done, the wow effect is gone and you're just left with a more dynamic version of the same or worse aesthetics that we're already used to. I expect it'll truly take off on next gen hardware, whenever that rolls out. Here's what RTX+DLDN actually looks like if not dialled down and smoothed: link to this video My takeaway is yes that quake 2 demo looks really cool, but you just know that they used every black magic hack in the book to get there, and most of it can't be replicated in a modern high fidelity game. It's definitely not a case of flicking an 'RTX on' switch.…
…have superior aesthetic quality This is quantifiable bs. Ray tracing as a technique is superior to rasterisation, but only with sufficient flops. And the current generation of hardware does not yield that critical number. So we get 'ray tracing', but so subdued and limited that existing approaches just flat out look better and also perform better. link to this video Or if you want a more approachable comparison of RTX vs. not-RTX. consider Minecraft+RTX1 vs. Minecraft+PTGI21link2link…
