So we’ll get another old game where everything looks oddly shiny instead of oddly dull?
That’s not what ray tracing is about at all. Reflections, imo, are the least interesting part of ray tracing.
Can you elaborate? Thanks!
Ray tracing is about implementing light and representing its behavior. Because reflections are, of course, a huge part of that it gets a lot of attention. Ray traced reflections allow things that aren’t otherwise on screen to be reflected without resorting to other clever tricks.
But other ray traced features implement light in (my opinion) more interesting ways. Global illumination, ambient occlusion, and shadows can all be implemented via RT and because they’re not limited by screen space information can be more accurate and, thus, impressive.
Light and objects in the world look like they belong and just look “right”. The way a sliver of sunlight can subtly light a room or the way an object appears grounded with accurate shadows can make non-RT lighting look wrong.
Check out Digital Foundry’s video on Metro Exodus Enhanced and they’ll surely go into some examples here.
I partially disagree, GI is easy to do most of the time with baked lighting, but reflections (especially more diffuse reflections) are hard unless you have very simple environments or tons of gpu resources to spend on rendering alternate camera angles. Even the more modern rasterized reflection techniques such as parallax corrected cubemaps or screen space reflections break easily if you look at them wrong. Raytraced global illumination and soft shadows are still great though, but are more easy to get around with regular rendering in most games where the environments are very static.
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*Laughs in 4090*
cries in 3080ti
To be honest, the biggest takeaway of the trailer is how well the original HL2 aged.
I might be in the minority here, but I couldn’t help but think Half-Life 2 still looks really good for a game released in 2004. Obviously “RTX on” is nicer to look at, but all the small details like the magnifying glass that actually magnifies made me appreciate the old assets/graphics so much, what a milestone it was.
The art direction is impeccable and it still shines for it.
Two thirds of graphics is art direction, the other third is tech. Source: a rule I just made up
And those 2/3s shine through, the last big engine update for HL2 was in 2007. It still looks great.
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Portal RTX runs pretty well on last gen cards with a little tweaking, I’m guessing we can expect the same for HL2.
I’ll be the one to be overly excited: GIVE IT TO ME!
You son of a bitch, I’m in!
Remember the Quake 2 RTX version? Remember how no one played it? It’s just, not a good look, runs slow and just isn’t needed. This is all just to make more people buy Nvidia cards.
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Quake 2 RTX is my go-to recommendation if someone wants to see what raytracing is actually about. Not only are there some built in tools to fiddle with lighting but the end result makes such a huge difference that I can’t see myself playing Quake 2 again without raytracing. Out of all the RTX supported games Quake 2 was the one that blew me away the most. It makes bright areas bright and dark areas actually dark and you can see how light sources, in real time, change the look of the environment.
Wish they’d do Hal-Life 1 with ray tracing because my video card might actually be able to run that one.
Quake 2 RTX can bring my 3090 to its knees. You could do HL2 but I bet it’d be about similar to Portal RTX
I believe its because the RTX remix games are path traced which is alot harder to do
Quake 2 doesn’t use RTX Remix. Or at least wasn’t advertised as that being the underlying tech.
Edit: I think I misunderstood what you were saying. Performance with Portal RTX Remix was significantly worse than with Quake 2 RTX.
Q2RTX is fully path traced, it was the path tracing tech demo before Portal RTX was.
What? Am I missing something? Several comments here about 3000 series not being able to handle what was easy for my 2060 to handle.
Probably at different resolutions. My 3080 has to drop to 25% minimum resolution and/or sub 60 fps when using the dynamic resolution option.
That’s 25% resolution from 4k, which I’m not sure is 1080p or 540p because it certainly looks blurrier than 1080p at lowest res.
There is Black Mesa if you’re looking for a Half Life 1 remake. Not sure if there is raytracing in it though.
Black Mesa was so fucking good it’s ridiculous.
If it did have it, it’d almost certainly be too much for my RTX 3060. Portal RTX didn’t work too well.
Ha. What? My 2060 has zero issues with this, what are you talking about?
Good news then: https://github.com/sultim-t/xash-rt/releases
Well, cool project but let me see something outside of that room!
Awesome, really looking forward to this!
I hope they do the episodes as well.
Download link, please? I can’t find one anywhere.
(Also, how in the hell do you install these things? I tried to play the RTX remix of NFS Underground 2, but gave up cause I couldn’t figure it out. There’s no installer, and it’s not as simple as just copying files over…)
It’s not out yet, this is just an announcement
