[@ Egosoft] have you been playing around with ray tracing for X4?

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[@ Egosoft] have you been playing around with ray tracing for X4?

Post by ice36bc » Fri, 21. Sep 18, 18:59

have you been playing around with ray tracing for X4?

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Post by CBJ » Fri, 21. Sep 18, 19:05

No. We're a bit busy to be "playing around" with anything at the moment!

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Post by ice36bc » Fri, 21. Sep 18, 19:35

there must be some in house testing to see if you can benefit from ray tracing?
example: ice asteroid. cockpit lighting with lighting from the sun. and how new material look inn game. Reflective surfaces. mirror surfaces where you can see your ship reflect back at you. and a loot more you can do with ray tracing.

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Post by Sandalpocalypse » Fri, 21. Sep 18, 19:39

Potentially its neat technology. But X games are going to be cpu limited for most players, and space games seem to be relatively easy on GPUs to begin with. I dont think theres much point trying to push $1000 gpus to their limit.
Irrational factors are clearly at work.

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Post by ice36bc » Fri, 21. Sep 18, 19:48

at the end of the day ray tracing is optional. you can turn it on and off. lower hardware recruitment will get the game in more hends. and that is a good thing. personally i like to see the developers push this and next gen to my favorite game series. day one review are the most important for games as youtubers and a like don't do retakes. i don't want to see another x:rebirth.

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Post by Tamina » Fri, 21. Sep 18, 20:05

It is not a killer feature and only accessible by a very small portion of gamers. I would rather have Egosoft concentrating on making it work smoothly on non-enthusiast hardware or make the game in general better for the larger portion of gamers.

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Post by radcapricorn » Fri, 21. Sep 18, 20:18

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Post by Skeeter » Fri, 21. Sep 18, 23:24

Yeah but ray tracing in a space game, that would add so much immersion visually for reflective effects and surfacing. If I knew a game made the effort and it was say a X game and I had the hardware I'd be so pumped to play it.

Maybe for XV then ray tracing might be more widespread and egosoft would hopefully invest in making ray tracing was done well in a space game.
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Post by DaMuncha » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 01:33

you dont "need" it now, but once games start coming out with it and you get used to having it in games, when you go back and play old games you think "eww this looks horrible"

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Post by Sandalpocalypse » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 02:01

by the time ray tracing is widely adopted, we'll be talking about x5
Irrational factors are clearly at work.

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Post by ishmaeltheforsaken » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 02:39

Given that you need to drop roughly US$1000 just to be able to turn the features on, and given that not even big teams like Eidos Montréal were able to get the tech ready for their games' launch, I really don't think it would be a worthwhile use of Egosoft's resources.

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Post by DavidGW » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 04:07

Sandalpocalypse wrote:Potentially its neat technology. But X games are going to be cpu limited for most players, and space games seem to be relatively easy on GPUs to begin with. I dont think theres much point trying to push $1000 gpus to their limit.
Well, if anything, if X4 is heavily CPU limited (I doubt that, XR isn't at least not anywhere near X3) that would be more reason to do it. If you're GPU's sitting mostly idle, you might as well make those CPU-limited frames as pretty as possible.

Now, I don't think ES should be doing it now, not many people can afford a 2080/2080ti, and many of those that can likely can't justify the price over what they already have.

However I think in 12-24 months, when X4 is pretty much done with a couple of DLCs released, it will be a different story. It's likely that by then many, if not most, people will be running something that supports ray-tracing, as more people upgrade their old GPUs, and RT compatibility trickles down into much cheaper options. I'd like to hope that ES might have a look at how easy it would be to implement RT at that point, and might think about adding it into X4 as a side project and practice for their next game.

I should think that as far as RT goes, a space game like the X series would benefit a lot, and with less of a performance overhead than many other games.

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Post by Arvel » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 07:35

As I recall, we're about 24 months into the 10-series' lifespan and the 1070, 1080 and 1080ti combined have only been adopted by about 9% of gamers according to Steam's hardware survey.

The most popular card, the 1060, has been adopted by 14% of the market, and the 1060's next-gen equivalent (the 2060) won't support Ray Tracing from what I've read. Only the 2070 and above do, and on top of Nvidia raising the MSRPs, the U.S. trade war with China is likely going to raise hardware prices further and hurt adoption rates in affected markets.

It'll be a stunning success for Nvidia if even 20% of the GPUs in people's gaming rigs support ray tracing two years from now. It'll probably take at least two or three hardware generations before Ray Tracing support becomes the norm among GPUs being used by gamers.

And that's just hardware support for it - given the massive hit to performance for even the 2080ti, I suspect most people (with cards that support it) will leave it disabled and forget about ray tracing. Using that new hardware architecture for DLSS on the other hand.. That I can see becoming quite popular among people with 4k displays.

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Post by mr.WHO » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 09:31

Tamina wrote:It is not a killer feature and only accessible by a very small portion of gamers. I would rather have Egosoft concentrating on making it work smoothly on non-enthusiast hardware or make the game in general better for the larger portion of gamers.
Exactly - this is nothing more than a tech gimmick, like the realistic hair techology from a few years back.

Unless we'll get to the point where GPU and CPU are so powerfull that the ray tracing eat up only small % of capacity, this will be probably turned off by most players.

No point for Egosoft to waste their time for technology that may or may not adopt in couple of years.

Even today I have a habit of switch off shadows or turning them to low beause back in the days they tend to eat up a lot of FPS.
Not to mention some of these tech are straight up repulsive - I always turn off motion blurr (or as I call it motion bluff) because it gives me nausea and it a cheap console method to mask ugly graphic.

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Post by DavidGW » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 09:54

I get what you're saying Arvel, and I mostly agree about the slow adoption. However, I don't think the overall conclusion is fair. You would not expect someone who has a 9xx NVIDIA card to upgrade to a 10xx card. I think the fact that we're 24 months into the 10xx generation is inconsequential, as if someone is waiting for a worthy upgrade, then they will keep waiting until a worthy upgrade is released, even if it's 12 months longer than they were expecting.

The competition at the high end of GPU is a bit weird right now, with NVIDIA being pretty close to a monopoly, and therefore having no real reason to release better GPUs on a fast schedule. Hopefully AMD will properly throw it's hat in the ring soon.

Yes, only the 1070 or above have hardware RT right now. However, I'd be very surprised if the next generation didn't have RT in lower tiers, and likely by the 40xx generation, they will be basically across the board. Especially if AMD embrace RT as well.

As far as Trump's tantrum tariff goes, I don't think it will last long. Once enough people realise it's just as damaging to the US as it is to the rest of the world, he'll overturn it and claim it as a "success". Either that, or he'll get booted at the next election, and the tariffs will disappear.

Also, I'm not convinced developers have had enough time to thoroughly explore heavily hybridised RT/Raster techniques, which could end up with most of the graphical benefits of RT, with most of the speed of rasters. Either way, a hypothetical RTX 4060 is likely to perform similarly to an RTX 2080ti, and could be available in around 24 months.

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Post by Hector0x » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 10:00

mr.WHO wrote:like the realistic hair techology from a few years back.
And this hair didn't even look better. I remember trying it out while playing the first tomb raider reboot. The air resistance felt way to high, making it flow like being underwater. Collision with her shoulder happened way above her body.
And the biggest bummer: Her hair never got dirty. It always looked fake and flawless, compared to the normal version which got stained over time.

Normally i'm not nitpicky about graphics. But if something is occupying this much system resources and gets advertised heavily, it should perfectly blend in.

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Post by DavidGW » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 10:13

mr.WHO wrote:Exactly - this is nothing more than a tech gimmick, like the realistic hair techology from a few years back.

Unless we'll get to the point where GPU and CPU are so powerfull that the ray tracing eat up only small % of capacity, this will be probably turned off by most players.

No point for Egosoft to waste their time for technology that may or may not adopt in couple of years.

Even today I have a habit of switch off shadows or turning them to low beause back in the days they tend to eat up a lot of FPS.
Not to mention some of these tech are straight up repulsive - I always turn off motion blurr (or as I call it motion bluff) because it gives me nausea and it a cheap console method to mask ugly graphic.
I think you are very wrong here. I would be astonished if ray tracing disappeared. It is obviously vastly superior to rasterisation for graphics quality, and improves EVERYTHING. In contrast, comparisons with TressFX Hair and HairWorks doesn't make sense, as they only focus on a tiny part of graphics.

We will get to the point where CPU/GPU is so powerful that ray tracing can be done with ease. Of course we will. It's just a question of whether it takes 2 years, or 5.

Shadows make graphics a lot more realistic. If you don't have the hardware to enable them, fair enough. But in a couple of years, next time you upgrade your computer, you will. Same with Ray Tracing.

Motion blur is not meant to "mask ugly graphics", it is supposed to mask ghosting. It does not matter how powerful your GPU is, or how low you set your graphics options, ghosting will always occur without motion blur because of display refresh rate limits, unless you own an expensive 120Hz+ gaming monitor. Even at those refresh rates, it's still going to be there, just less noticeable. Decent motion blur at reasonable refresh rates should remove it completely.

By the time ES have finished polishing X4, and released a couple of DLCs for it, I expect we'll have a pretty clear idea of whether RT is here to stay or not. We also have no idea how difficult it would be for ES to implement ray tracing. It could be so hard that even if everyone got a compatible GPU for Christmas, it wouldn't be worth it. Or, it could be a reasonably easy addition for a game like X4, which would make it worthwhile to add for the benefit of the few people who do have a compatible graphics card in 2020. We don't know. The ES devs might know, but I doubt it, as they obviously have other things more important to do right now.

But again, things might change in 12-24 months.

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Post by mr.WHO » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 10:37

DavidGW wrote:
I think you are very wrong here. I would be astonished if ray tracing disappeared. It is obviously vastly superior to rasterisation for graphics quality, and improves EVERYTHING. In contrast, comparisons with TressFX Hair and HairWorks doesn't make sense, as they only focus on a tiny part of graphics.
I'm not sure if making everything unnaturally flashy, shiny and reflective justify investing in high end GPU:

https://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/st ... .45-PM.png

Look at that picture - you notice the reflection in the center that draw attention, but when you look at the rest of picture it's not so astonishing at all. For now it's just a gimmick and will remain at least for several years untill this will become standard for mid and low end GPU.

Not to mention the original sin of AAA industry - putting too much efford and cash into graphic and marketing, while the game mechanic become more and more shallow and repetetive (see Battlefield V and every second game planned to release in near future to be Battle Royale).

I'll stick to "ugly games" of Egosoft, even X-Rebirth.
Last edited by mr.WHO on Sat, 22. Sep 18, 16:45, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Arvel » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 16:14

DavidGW wrote:I get what you're saying Arvel, and I mostly agree about the slow adoption. However, I don't think the overall conclusion is fair. You would not expect someone who has a 9xx NVIDIA card to upgrade to a 10xx card. I think the fact that we're 24 months into the 10xx generation is inconsequential, as if someone is waiting for a worthy upgrade, then they will keep waiting until a worthy upgrade is released, even if it's 12 months longer than they were expecting.

The competition at the high end of GPU is a bit weird right now, with NVIDIA being pretty close to a monopoly, and therefore having no real reason to release better GPUs on a fast schedule. Hopefully AMD will properly throw it's hat in the ring soon.

Yes, only the 1070 or above have hardware RT right now. However, I'd be very surprised if the next generation didn't have RT in lower tiers, and likely by the 40xx generation, they will be basically across the board. Especially if AMD embrace RT as well.

As far as Trump's tantrum tariff goes, I don't think it will last long. Once enough people realise it's just as damaging to the US as it is to the rest of the world, he'll overturn it and claim it as a "success". Either that, or he'll get booted at the next election, and the tariffs will disappear.

Also, I'm not convinced developers have had enough time to thoroughly explore heavily hybridised RT/Raster techniques, which could end up with most of the graphical benefits of RT, with most of the speed of rasters. Either way, a hypothetical RTX 4060 is likely to perform similarly to an RTX 2080ti, and could be available in around 24 months.
I agree AMD needs to step up. While Intel has announced they're planning to enter the GPU market, I'm not overly optimistic since they're basically the Nvidia of CPUs.

Anyway, you seem to agree with the gist of what I was saying: It'll be two to three hardware generations (i.e. the 30-series or 40-series) before the majority of GPUs in the ecosystem support ray tracing.

I agree the hardware isn't likely to disappear, I just think the 20-series isn't powerful enough for games with ray tracing to really take off. Even the 2080ti seems to struggle with 30 frames on current titles, and while driver efficiency and implementation will surely improve, that's still not a promising indicator for their top-end GPU.

The main reason I predict Turing architecture will gain traction is DLSS. Based on early testing it provides a significant boost to performance while looking near-as-good or sometimes better than 4k with TAA. Developers appear to concur, as more than twice as many upcoming titles have announced DLSS support as they have for ray tracing.

At any rate, I suppose we'll have to wait and see. I think it's something Egosoft could potentially patch into the game a few years from now if it seems worthwhile, but I think this question will be more relevant when the tech has matured and Egosoft is working on X5 or X4's equivalent to Terran Conflict.

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Post by Alan Phipps » Sat, 22. Sep 18, 17:56

Since this has already been replied to in respect of X4 and has then developed into a general discussion of RTX and graphics hardware, this can move over to Off Topic.
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