Does the game have Ray Tracing?

[Lloyd Franklin]

The game has almost all natural light, I thought Ray Tracing would look amazing, especially RT Ambient Occlusion.

[PRAET0R1AN™]

No raytracing at all, The game uses prebaked lighting and very high resolution reflective maps aswell as screen space ambient occlusion and screen space reflections.

[Dad0ne]

nope.exe. Imagine if this thing actually had ray tracing. It would melt cpus lol.

[episoder]

raytracing is kinda big ask to implement. the hbv building would stress cpus alot more than it already does. as much as i'd like better water reflections in certain shots. i'm fine with the performance the planar, screen space and cubemap hybrid delivers rn.

[PRAET0R1AN™]

You can use reshade to simulate RT but it's very CPU intensive on top of an already CPU intensive game, I couldn't imagine it would perform very well.

[kgkong]

TLOU uses an advance form of global illumination lighting that is not Ray Tracing. Among the other lighting features others had said, the game uses real-time reflections. Not Ray Tracing reflection, just real-time reflection. A type of global illumination screen space reflection system that looks almost the same as Ray Tracing reflections and actually takes less hardware power to do it.

[episoder]

Originally posted by KingGorillaKong:

TLOU uses an advance form of global illumination lighting that is not Ray Tracing. Among the other lighting features others had said, the game uses real-time reflections. Not Ray Tracing reflection, just real-time reflection. A type of global illumination screen space reflection system that looks almost the same as Ray Tracing reflections and actually takes less hardware power to do it.

alota buzzwords. reflection and gi are not really connected tho. the reflection is rendered seperately. mostly reflection probes for performance reasons. planar reflections basicly renders the whole scene twice. once upside down at the water level. this has a significant performance hit tho. the faster option is screenspace reflection where just the framebuffer is flipped upside down. it's prone to artefacts tho where geometry in the foreground overlaps with the reflection in the background. a known limitation with different approaches to fix those.

if you wanna google some graphics tech: the gi is using a voxel grid algorithm. i'm not going to deep and check if it does indeed add to the reflections. doesn't matter much.

it looks good. yo

[kgkong]

Originally posted by episoder:

Originally posted by KingGorillaKong:

TLOU uses an advance form of global illumination lighting that is not Ray Tracing. Among the other lighting features others had said, the game uses real-time reflections. Not Ray Tracing reflection, just real-time reflection. A type of global illumination screen space reflection system that looks almost the same as Ray Tracing reflections and actually takes less hardware power to do it.

alota buzzwords. reflection and gi are not really connected tho. the reflection is rendered seperately. mostly reflection probes for performance reasons. planar reflections basicly renders the whole scene twice. once upside down at the water level. this has a significant performance hit tho. the faster option is screenspace reflection where just the framebuffer is flipped upside down. it's prone to artefacts tho where geometry in the foreground overlaps with the reflection in the background. a known limitation with different approaches to fix those.

if you wanna google some graphics tech: the gi is using a voxel grid algorithm. i'm not going to deep and check if it does indeed add to the reflections. doesn't matter much.

it looks good. yo

Since it's baked and it's not doing as many passes, it's not gonna look as accurate as you can get with true real-time or ray tracing paths. But if you compare this style of lighting/reflection to any other game that uses ray tracing paths and reflections, you get a near same quality look of the reflection but it might not be as accurate to all the lights in the scene, or animated characters.

It's by far a thousand times better than standard GI and reflections that are used by many other games. Dead Island 2 uses the most basic GI and screen space reflections and it's barely putting a workload on my system. But comparing TLOU on medium and high settings, TLOU reflections look better than DI2 on ultra does (for reflections only). The rest of Dead Island 2 is pretty simplified, older style animations, character models, standard GI lighting, but everything is baked in a massive layer of Post Processing so all the textures look a lot sharper than they actually are.