• WaterWaiver@aussie.zone
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    2 days ago

    Ooh thankyou for the link.

    “We can leverage it [ray tracing] for things we haven’t been able to do in the past, which is giving accurate hit detection”

    “So when you fire your weapon, the [hit] detection would be able to tell if you’re hitting a pixel that is leather sitting next to a pixel that is metal”

    “Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily, and we would pick one or the other because the materials were too complex. Ray tracing can do this on a per-pixel basis and showcase if you’re hitting metal or even something that’s fur. It makes the game more immersive, and you get that direct feedback as the player.”

    It sounds like they’re assigning materials based off the pixels of a texture map, rather than each mesh in a model being a different material. ie you paint materials onto a character rather than selecting chunks of the character and assigning them.

    I suspect this either won’t be noticeable at all to players or it will be a very minor improvement (at best). It’s not something worth going for in exchange for losing compatibility with other GPUs. It will require a different work pipeline for the 3D modellers (they have to paint materials on now rather than assign them per-mesh), but that’s neither here nor there, it might be easier for them or it might be hell-awful depending on the tooling.

    This particular sentence upsets me:

    Before ray tracing, we couldn’t distinguish between two pixels very easily

    Uhuh. You’re not selling me on your game company.

    “Before” ray tracing, the technology that has been around for decades. That you could do on a CPU or GPU for this very material-sensing task without the players noticing for around 20 years. Interpolate UVs across the colliding triangle and sample a texture.

    I suspect the “more immersion” and “direct feedback” are veils over the real reasoning:

    During NVIDIA’s big GeForce RTX 50 Series reveal, we learned that id has been working closely with the GeForce team on the game for several years (source)

    With such a strong emphasis on RT and DLSS, it remains to be seen how these games will perform for AMD Radeon users

    No-one sane implements Nvidia or AMD (or anyone else) exclusive libraries into their games unless they’re paid to do it. A game dev that cares about its players will make their game run well on all brands and flavours of graphics card.

    At the end of the day this hurts consumers. If your games work on all GPU brands competitively then you have more choice and card companies are better motivated to compete. Whatever amount of money Nvidia is paying the gamedevs to do this must be smaller than what they earn back from consumers buying more of their product instead of competitors.

    • Dark ArcA
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      2 days ago

      Well like, basically every shooter currently uses a hitbox to do the hitscan and that never matches the model 1:1. The hitboxes are typically far less detailed and the weak points are just a different part of the hitbox that is similarly less detailed.

      I think what they’re doing is using the RT specialized hardware to evaluate the bullet path (just like a ray of light from a point) more cheaply than can be traditionally done on the GPU (effectively what Nvidia enabled when they introduced hardware designed for ray tracing).

      If I’m guessing correctly, it’s not so much that they’re disregarding the mesh but they’re disregarding hitbox design. Like, the hit damage is likely based on the mesh and the actual rendered model vs the simplified hitbox … so there’s no “you technically shot past their ear, but it’s close enough so we’re going to call it a headshot” sort of stuff.

      If you’re doing a simulated shotgun blast that could also be a hundred pellets being simulated through the barrel heading towards the target as well. Then add in more enemies that shoot things and a few new gun designs and… maybe it starts to make sense.