Ray-Traced Shadows in an RTS Space Sim ... why?

[Adam Beckett]

There is a new Nvidia driver out there and Nvidia accompanies it with an 'article', as they always do, promoting RTX and 'Ray-Tracing'. This one included HW3,

"Whenever you take to space in your mothership, you’ll discover day-one support for DLSS 2, accelerating performance on GeForce RTX PCs. And if you find your frame rates fast enough, you can also activate Homeworld 3’s ray-traced shadows to take visual fidelity and immersion to the next level"

... now, this is typical 'marketing speak' and nobody should pay attention to it, except the people writing such stuff for a living.

What strikes me though is the very idea of having "ray-traced shadows" in a ... space sim, with tiny ships. Why? What is the purpose? Why does it HAVE to exist, in the first place ... except for marketing reasons? "Our game has RAY-TRACING! Check it out!"(?)

What kind of light bounces off in the 'darkness of space'?

Granted, HW games always had those colorful dynamic backgrounds, unless you turned them off (googlebing "vertex color skydomes". A HW dev did a GDC talk about it, ages ago, which I can no longer find online),.

But, what is the benefit of 'real time ray traced shadows' in an RTS game like this ... really?

All kinds of newly developed video games keep adding 'DLSS' and FSR/XeSS to their graphic settings, since 'optimizing' games for performance is no longer 'a thing' - or, all senior low level rendering/graphic engine programmers left the industry or retired all together?

But, THEN you counteract the frames you gain with DLSS/FSR by allowing rendering gimmicks which are what ... important? Necessary? Or rather, a marketing selling point, to the people who bought RTX cards and thirst to justify their purchase to feel good about it?

What decades old (and proven) conventional techniques are so inferior - which have to be implemented anyway, for the non 'RT' players - that adding 'RT' makes the extra work justifiable? More importantly, that makes the extra 300 Watts per frame(?!!) justifiable?

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I am not looking forward to the thread comment snipers, who will write here that I can "just ignore this feature or turn it 'off'. Problem solved."

I AM looking forward to those comments which can explain to me why ray-traced shadows in this game are a visually exemplary addition and the extra 300 Watts-per-Frame cost is "worth it because of ..." xyz. I cannot 'see' that myself, right now.

[Ersatz]

There are a lot of megaliths and other sorts of space scenery in the game, as well as the potential for smaller ships to cast more realistic shadows on larger ships. Sure, you're probably not going to be noticing during battles, but Homeworld has always been an incredible looking game.

So I guess that's why. It's also a lot less effort for developers to implement ray tracing than traditional shadows - but of course there's a higher cost when it comes to rendering.

If you don't like it, don't turn it on - options are always good.

[herbstwerk]

So this is basically either the old "Why do we need graphical feature x, y, or z?" debate that has taken place since games have been a thing or a overly complicated attempt at Jester farming.

If it's the first, I totally agree. Games were better in 2D and sprites were already too much... let's go back to ASCII. Maybe we should switch back to punch cards while we're at it. /s

[Tericc]

i mean i agree with both sides but why devs add blur effect in their games is just heretical.

[Ersatz]

Originally posted by herbstwerk:

So this is basically either the old "Why do we need graphical feature x, y, or z?" debate that has taken place since games have been a thing or a overly complicated attempt at Jester farming.

Can we at least agree that chromatic aberration was a mistake, though?

[garytc78]

I think that Ray traced shadow will be an amazing addition!

[garytc78]

Originally posted by Tericc:

i mean i agree with both sides but why devs add blur effect in their games is just heretical.

Maybe you mean chromatic aberration or Dept of Field? I like both effects

[garytc78]

Originally posted by Ersatz:

Originally posted by herbstwerk:

So this is basically either the old "Why do we need graphical feature x, y, or z?" debate that has taken place since games have been a thing or a overly complicated attempt at Jester farming.

Can we at least agree that chromatic aberration was a mistake, though?

I know many dislike chromatic aberration, but I like it . It adds more of cinematic feeling to many games

[Adam Beckett]

Originally posted by Knightspace:

Ah yes, dismiss comments disagreeing with you before someone even writes them lmao.

Those features are for people who want eye candy on their big displays and beefy GPUs. It's as simple as that. Ships aren't even all that tiny and megastructures are massive. Different environments will also showcase this technology, as we know there will be more than just "space".

But eh, i'm pretty sure you already made up your mind.

If anyone wants to write "turn it off" - that is not a 'disagreement' - that is just a waste of everyone's time. 'First responders in forum threads' are a very selected breed. I am just asking people to write something more interesting instead. This thread is not about 'me'. It is about 'ray traced shadow rendering in RTS' ... and why someone may think "this is good, here is why ..."

I have nothing against "eye candy". I love "eye candy". I like my "eye candy" in games.

My question is how is 'real time ray traced shadows' so much superior to rasterized rendering methods, that it can be justified in a game like this?

You can do dynamic shadows, recursive reflections, refractions, or any reflected/bounced light with rasterized rendering by 'faking' it, with conventional methods?

[Ersatz]

Originally posted by garytc78:

I think that Ray traced shadow will be an amazing addition!

It'll likely be barely noticable during actual gameplay - but it's probably going to look good for screenshots and I broadly agree that it's inclusion is a good thing - if only because as hardware generally becomes more capable, ray tracing stuff really saves time.

[Ersatz]

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

My question is how is 'real time ray traced shadows' so much superior to rasterized rendering methods, that it can be justified in a game like this?

You can do dynamic shadows, recursive reflections, refractions, or any reflected/bounced light with rasterized rendering by 'faking' it, with conventional methods?

On the other hand, how is raster superior to Ray Tracing for games like this? As mentioned, Ray Tracing is simpler to implement, especially in single-dominant-lightsource games like Homeworld and it ensures consistency across the entire scene.

Of the two techniques, Raster is what needed much more dev time sunk into it for the same effect, or worse. The fact that they've provided both is great, but RT is the easy part of it.

If you're arguing from a position of "it could (and has) been done in Raster, why bother with anything else?" well, that's just not how progress really works and of all the things to be sceptical about when it comes to Homeworld 3, this is so far down the priority list, you're going to need to enable NLIPS to see it.

[Adam Beckett]

Originally posted by Ersatz:

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

My question is how is 'real time ray traced shadows' so much superior to rasterized rendering methods, that it can be justified in a game like this?

You can do dynamic shadows, recursive reflections, refractions, or any reflected/bounced light with rasterized rendering by 'faking' it, with conventional methods?

On the other hand, how is raster superior to Ray Tracing for games like this? As mentioned, Ray Tracing is simpler to implement, especially in single-dominant-lightsource games like Homeworld and it ensures consistency across the entire scene.

Of the two techniques, Raster is what needed much more dev time sunk into it for the same effect, or worse. The fact that they've provided both is great, but RT is the easy part of it.

If you're arguing from a position of "it could (and has) been done in Raster, why bother with anything else?" well, that's just not how progress really works and of all the things to be sceptical about when it comes to Homeworld 3, this is so far down the priority list, you're going to need to enable NLIPS to see it.

All good points. I hear you. I agree with everything you wrote, since this is also the debate I have in my head about this.



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I am going to lean a bit further.

1. Most people do not understand (enough) how graphic rendering works, hence ...

2. ... most people do not 'see' and will never 'see' any difference in this game in particular, when turning 'ray traced shadows' on or off.

3. Peter Molyneux's 'theorem' applies*.

I quote him in the past two decades a lot. He once said in an interview:

*) "After 10 minutes nobody cares about 'graphics' ..."

- meaning, the game has captured you in a way that you are either engaged in it, with it, or ... not, and you have still time to gaze around.

4. It takes a 'Digital Foundry Graphic-Porn Comparison video' by Alex Battaglia to really 'see' the difference between rasterized effects and the ray-traced effects.

You can googlebing any video from them and you will see them zooming in to still image screenshots to see the slightly more blurry pixels vs the slightly less blurry pixels. When the game runs, the player would neither see a 'difference', nor know about a difference, nor CARE about a 'difference'? If the game(play) itself is good?

Play Cyberpunk 2077 with full path-tracing on and off for an hour or more and then tell me the 'ray-traced version is so much better'. I will doubt you. And Cyberpunk and other RT games do 'ray-tracing' in a much more complex and on a deeper level than HW3 does.

I am not saying 'nobody can see a difference'. There is an actual difference to be seen in many games ... for a while. Then, all our human brains are passed the 'processing high fidelity images' part and our brain is in the 'moving shapes' default brain stage, which we humans and our anatomy is all about for over a million years.

A good bad example for a game that has rasterized and ray-tracing in it is "Ghostwire Tokyo" - this is a game, I myself - for the first time - find impossible to endure, since every light casting and shadow in this game is 'wrong' from a basic human experience. It shows you downtown Tokyo at night. it puts you in dark corridors. But, where you expect a reflection or bouncing light from a police car light siren ... there is none. Where you expect a shadow to be cast from a single light bulb in an office corridor ... there is none. This game 'looks wrong' in so many ways. Even with (mathematically) accurate 'ray-tracing' elements in it.

There is a great example of a very old game that did pre-baked shadows right to a perfection: Half-Life 1. Play HL1 with the excellent ray-tracing mod and compare it with the original. The colors, tone-mapping, shadowmaps ... are almost identical, because they were 'computed right' - just not in 'real time'.

I can see benefits - as mentioned in the comment above - for developers to use 'ray-tracing' to simplify their work. Absolutely valid point - the day, they can skip having to do 'both' for non RT-card owners. Until then, imho, some early RT implementations (and we are still in the 'early days') seem to me more driven by marketing and publishers instead the developers themselves, who HAVE to do the work twice (if not even more often - D3D/OpenGL/Vulkan).

[HanzSlomo]

Originally posted by Ersatz:

Originally posted by herbstwerk:

So this is basically either the old "Why do we need graphical feature x, y, or z?" debate that has taken place since games have been a thing or a overly complicated attempt at Jester farming.

Can we at least agree that chromatic aberration was a mistake, though?

Aberration always give me a headache after a while

[Ersatz]

Originally posted by Adam Beckett:

Play Cyberpunk 2077 with full path-tracing on and off for an hour or more and then tell me the 'ray-traced version is so much better'. I will doubt you. And Cyberpunk and other RT games do 'ray-tracing' in a much more complex and on a deeper level than HW3 does.

Yeah, but I can play Deus Ex 1 for 20 minutes and not "see" how outdated the graphics are - although I wouldn't be surprised if Liberty Island still runs like ♥♥♥♥! You adjust to whatever you're looking at, so if that's the point you're making then I agree with you - Ray Tracing is a waste of time because after the first few minutes of hypodermic "wow" it basically becomes invisible.

The problem for me is that it doesn't begin with Ray Tracing, and we should be arguing to wind back a lot of developments on the graphic front, because ultimately, they're cool but they're not needed.

You know what? I think you've sold me. We do that and I'm never going to need to upgrade my computer again.

[Backstroke of the west]

I have a 4090, I want my ray traced shadows.

[Ersatz]

Originally posted by Carl Sagan:

I have a 4090, I want my ray traced shadows.

Sorry, OP changed my mind on this, I'm going to need you to turn them off. Also, please provide me with your address so I can come over and check.