First in an Epic post. This will be a day long remembered, the end of Unreal Engine 4 and the destruction of LODs, Normal Maps, Light Maps, Baking, DX12, lost working hours, crunch time for devs...and maybe, just maybe, the white sheen on surfaces that Unreal Engine has had since DX9

This is how it goes. The showcase, tech demos and then actuall games. Not that they will come any time soon.

But but... Epic baaaaaaad! :p

TheDeeGee:

But but... Epic baaaaaaad! :p

Apple lost the case btw @()@

Wow! Lumen also looks fantastic, we dont even need RT cores.

Loobyluggs:

Apple lost the case btw @()@

Got some links to follow the case? Haven't checked in a while

The thing I hope they fix is when you first load up a game and then appear in the game world and then you see the textures kind of..... materialize in front of you.

ThEcLiT:

Wow! Lumen also looks fantastic, we dont even need RT cores.

On the other hand, GPUs with RT acceleration are not used to their full potential and a lot of power is wasted. Considering this is an engine for next gen games, it should use modern GPUs completely and that includes making use of RT acceleration.

ThEcLiT:

Wow! Lumen also looks fantastic, we dont even need RT cores.

Underrated comment. Personally I still don't see the benefits of ray tracing on games. There have been beautiful games that haven't used them and still look more pleasing and more realistic that today's games with ray tracing. Heck, just look at the remastered Crysis. Other than better textures, most things just look like plastic!

I've seen things in UE3, UE4 tech demos that I still haven't seen in games still...I've seen in-house engines do great things. My point is, I guess, in reality, UE doesn't matter as much as we/they would like it to. Most popular games don't use UE engines.

Please don't be blurry like most Unreal games now. I literally can't play any of them because they hurt my eyes after only a few minutes.

KissSh0t:

The thing I hope they fix is when you first load up a game and then appear in the game world and then you see the textures kind of..... materialize in front of you.

That was really noticeable in FF IV remake

XenthorX:

Got some links to follow the case? Haven't checked in a while

The judge will be spending 'months' sorting through the paperwork, but has already conceded Apple has behaved anti-competitively by implication of the retort against what Apple gave in testimony. As to how to apply law to this, is the problem, and it's a problem for the judge. Epic have yet to provide decent citations, yet; has given her verdict by implication of the grilling Cook got. He figuratively got 'cooked' by the judge. The salient points are also here My favourite exchange is this: [spoiler] Rogers: But let me ask you, so banking apps. I have multiple banking apps, I haven’t paid for them, but I suspect other than the $99, you don’t charge Wells Fargo, right? Or Bank of America? But you’re charging the gamers to subsidize Wells Fargo. Cook: In the gamers example, they’re transacting on our platform. Rogers: People are doing lots of things on your platform. Cook: But this is a digital transaction with an observable change in currency. Rogers: It’s just a choice of a model. Cook: We’ve made a choice. There are clearly other ways to monetize, but we chose this one, because we think this one overall is the best way. Rogers: Well, it’s quite lucrative. But it seems to be lucrative and focused on purchases that are being made frankly on an impulse basis — that’s a totally different question, about whether that’s a good thing or not, it’s not really right for antitrust law — but it does appear to be disproportionate. I understand this notion that somehow Apple’s bringing the customers to the users. But after that first time, after that first interaction, the [developers] are keeping the customer with the games. Apple’s just profiting off that, it seems to me. [/spoiler] Bullet-proof golden logic is always a joy to read.

I had to highlight that color yellow to be able to see it.... it's so hard to read.

Loobyluggs:

The judge will be spending 'months' sorting through the paperwork, but has already conceded Apple has behaved anti-competitively by implication of the retort against what Apple gave in testimony. As to how to apply law to this, is the problem, and it's a problem for the judge. Epic have yet to provide decent citations, yet; has given her verdict by implication of the grilling Cook got. He figuratively got 'cooked' by the judge. The salient points are also here My favourite exchange is this: [spoiler] Rogers: But let me ask you, so banking apps. I have multiple banking apps, I haven’t paid for them, but I suspect other than the $99, you don’t charge Wells Fargo, right? Or Bank of America? But you’re charging the gamers to subsidize Wells Fargo. Cook: In the gamers example, they’re transacting on our platform. Rogers: People are doing lots of things on your platform. Cook: But this is a digital transaction with an observable change in currency. Rogers: It’s just a choice of a model. Cook: We’ve made a choice. There are clearly other ways to monetize, but we chose this one, because we think this one overall is the best way. Rogers: Well, it’s quite lucrative. But it seems to be lucrative and focused on purchases that are being made frankly on an impulse basis — that’s a totally different question, about whether that’s a good thing or not, it’s not really right for antitrust law — but it does appear to be disproportionate. I understand this notion that somehow Apple’s bringing the customers to the users. But after that first time, after that first interaction, the [developers] are keeping the customer with the games. Apple’s just profiting off that, it seems to me. [/spoiler] Bullet-proof golden logic is always a joy to read.

Thanks for that. Hope i understand all the nuances, didn't expect this segmentation over time which indeed makes perfect sense.

KissSh0t:

I had to highlight that color yellow to be able to see it.... it's so hard to read.

Same here

heffeque:

Underrated comment. Personally I still don't see the benefits of ray tracing on games. There have been beautiful games that haven't used them and still look more pleasing and more realistic that today's games with ray tracing. Heck, just look at the remastered Crysis. Other than better textures, most things just look like plastic!

That's because most of today's games waste raytracing on things like shiny surfaces and shadows, which don't need it. Raytracing, when used properly, is the difference between something looking good vs questioning reality. It's the secondary lighting effects that really separates raytracing, but the effect is usually very subtle so it seems devs (maybe Nvidia) don't push for it. To me, they're just shooting themselves in the foot, because getting a significant performance loss for no worthwhile visual difference is a terrible way to demonstrate the tech.

Loobyluggs:

Apple lost the case btw @()@

that's your opinion?.... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/in-the-epic-vs-apple-court-fight-theres-one-clear-winner-11622030554

heffeque:

Underrated comment. Personally I still don't see the benefits of ray tracing on games. There have been beautiful games that haven't used them and still look more pleasing and more realistic that today's games with ray tracing. Heck, just look at the remastered Crysis. Other than better textures, most things just look like plastic!

Lumen uses raytracing.. I think people need to realize that RT is a new tool to developers and that tool can be used in a variety of different ways. Epic is combining a number of previous RT implementations to optimize the rendering (screen space tracing, signed distance fields and voxel tracing). But all of those are methods of raytracing. Furthermore we've already seen how these optimization methods can have flaws - the original Crytek demo with their RT implementation for example looked great in the demo at night but fell apart in Crysis remastered - but it also uses a blend of RT effects to get optimization similar to Lumen. I also want to point out that while the lighting is good here - the vast majority of what makes these demos look so good are the megascan textures and ninite. Go look at UE4 demos with megascans - they look just as good. [youtube=adoQgoETRsQ] Ninite allows them to use the textures on high quality assets in real time.

schmidtbag:

That's because most of today's games waste raytracing on things like shiny surfaces and shadows, which don't need it. Raytracing, when used properly, is the difference between something looking good vs questioning reality. It's the secondary lighting effects that really separates raytracing, but the effect is usually very subtle so it seems devs (maybe Nvidia) don't push for it. To me, they're just shooting themselves in the foot, because getting a significant performance loss for no worthwhile visual difference is a terrible way to demonstrate the tech.

It doesn't seem to you it's a bit crazy to speak about things like "Image quality" and "looking good" in absolute terms when in fact these things are 1) a moving target 2) thoroughly subjective ? Also, when not seeing eye to eye with a multi-billion company, my instinct is to 2nd guess my reasoning. Not to conclude they "they're just shooting themselves in the foot" Again YMMV 🙂

Noisiv:

It doesn't seem to you it's a bit crazy to speak about things like "Image quality" and "looking good" in absolute terms when in fact these things are 1) a moving target 2) thoroughly subjective ?

Does it seem a bit crazy to you quoting me against things I never said or implied? Kind of ironic, since you're literally moving the target. I never mentioned "image quality", and I spoke of "looking good" in a subjective manner. Being fooled into what is or isn't reality is an absolute term: you're either convinced something looks real or you don't. Movies that pull off CGI where you don't know it's CGI accomplish their realism in large part because of raytracing.

Also, when not seeing eye to eye with a multi-billion company, my instinct is to 2nd guess my reasoning. Not to conclude they "they're just shooting themselves in the foot" Again YMMV 🙂

Riiiiiight... because multi-billion dollar companies are totally infallible and never lose touch with their audiences... You have all the proof you need I'm right about this just by reading further up this thread. People are questioning the value of realtime RT and have been for a while. @heffeque's opinion isn't some odd exception. Therefore, these companies are in fact making a mistake. I completely understand why so many people don't get it: most implementations of RT don't yield a noteworthy visual improvement (if any improvement at all) and yet it's very computationally expensive. There are amazing benefits to it, but we're not seeing examples to justify it. Using RT for shiny surfaces and shadows when classical rasterization could do it much more cheaply is just reinventing the wheel but with more steps and resources, when instead we could be inventing a new form of flight.