Next-Gen PS5 & XSX |OT| Console tEch threaD

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The Unreal 5 Demo on the PS5 Used Software Ray-Tracing Similar to ReShade's Ray-Tracing Shader (Ray Traced GI)

Daniel Wright, the Technical Director of Graphics at Epic, said:

Lumen uses ray tracing to solve indirect lighting, but not triangle ray tracing. Lumen traces rays against a scene representation consisting of signed distance fields, voxels, and height fields. As a result, it requires no special ray tracing hardware.

Lumen uses a combination of different techniques to efficiently trace rays. Screen-space traces handle tiny details, mesh signed distance field traces handle medium-scale light transfer and voxel traces handle large scale light transfer.

 
The Unreal 5 Demo on the PS5 Used Software Ray-Tracing Similar to ReShade's Ray-Tracing Shader (Ray Traced GI)

Daniel Wright, the Technical Director of Graphics at Epic, said:

Lumen uses ray tracing to solve indirect lighting, but not triangle ray tracing. Lumen traces rays against a scene representation consisting of signed distance fields, voxels, and height fields. As a result, it requires no special ray tracing hardware.

Lumen uses a combination of different techniques to efficiently trace rays. Screen-space traces handle tiny details, mesh signed distance field traces handle medium-scale light transfer and voxel traces handle large scale light transfer.

Yeah, I remember watching a video explaining that lumen must involve a form of ray tracing in its lighting calculations, it's just not hardware accelerated. Glad to see it's confirmed.
Now, could any part of this ray tracing solution be relayed to the dedicated hardware?
 
The Unreal 5 Demo on the PS5 Used Software Ray-Tracing Similar to ReShade's Ray-Tracing Shader (Ray Traced GI)

Daniel Wright, the Technical Director of Graphics at Epic, said:

Lumen uses ray tracing to solve indirect lighting, but not triangle ray tracing. Lumen traces rays against a scene representation consisting of signed distance fields, voxels, and height fields. As a result, it requires no special ray tracing hardware.

Lumen uses a combination of different techniques to efficiently trace rays. Screen-space traces handle tiny details, mesh signed distance field traces handle medium-scale light transfer and voxel traces handle large scale light transfer.

How when ps5 doesn't have RT hardware and is only rdna 1
 
The Unreal 5 Demo on the PS5 Used Software Ray-Tracing Similar to ReShade's Ray-Tracing Shader (Ray Traced GI)

Daniel Wright, the Technical Director of Graphics at Epic, said:

Lumen uses ray tracing to solve indirect lighting, but not triangle ray tracing. Lumen traces rays against a scene representation consisting of signed distance fields, voxels, and height fields. As a result, it requires no special ray tracing hardware.

Lumen uses a combination of different techniques to efficiently trace rays. Screen-space traces handle tiny details, mesh signed distance field traces handle medium-scale light transfer and voxel traces handle large scale light transfer.

Oh, boy, Discord gang will try to use this article somehow to say PS5 doesn't have hardware RT. 😅
 
Speaking of downplaying the SSD, take a look at even more butthurt people.

Damn. Tom's Hardware is was the most reliable PC website I could think of. Internet's hit the bottom very hard.

I think Phill or someone already mentioned how a number of Series X titles will be using UE5, of course it will be moulded and scaled differently depending on the game, developers and consoles. I think Hellblade 2 is also using UE5. Should be really cool.
To the contrary, it shows how impotent internal Xbox studios used to be as only one of them (Turn 10) has an engine which they iterate and scale with their subsequent hardware releases. That's one of the main reasons many Xbox games will never look like true first-party titles. I mean, UE5 is fine but the fact that it's multiplatform means it'll never utilize any given hardware to the fullest. For that you need a dedicated engine.


Yeah, I remember watching a video explaining that lumen must involve a form of ray tracing in its lighting calculations, it's just not hardware accelerated. Glad to see it's confirmed.
Now, could any part of this ray tracing solution be relayed to the dedicated hardware?
Global Illumination is the general term for many raytracing solutions, from what I know. Full path tracing (like in Minecraft) is just one of those techniques and it's interesting to see how devs try to avoid it like a plague. I think that Sony (and also Epic) never wanted RT but they got it in the RDNA2 "package" from AMD so there it is. I imagine the second or third wave of games might try to use it for small improvements like mirrors and window reflections but it'll be minimal. This is the streaming generation, not raytracing one, which I'm quite glad for after seeing the horrible AMD demo. Nvidia has better ideas for RT so far.
 
Speaking of raytracing on XSX, it's a weird thing. There are two sources I know of which show it in Minecradt. One is Digital Foundry who analyse a video provided by Microsoft so I'm going to skip that one. The other is that Austin Evans guy who was the other outlet revealing the console. His video is really weird and it all starts around the 2m44s mark.



He shows Minecraft RT running on XSX but we can see it's not the same tower box he shows in the same video, it's a devbox (in fact, there are 3 stacked next to the TV). So he starts talking about RT but walks around in the normal mode, then stops, switches to RT and... just turns around. I don't get it at all - why not walk around showing the graphics? Those are just 1-2 second periods when we see the image moving, then a cut to the video provided by Microsoft, then another take at RT-less walking and again the same procedure. I don't buy it at all.
 
Damn. Tom's Hardware is was the most reliable PC website I could think of. Internet's hit the bottom very hard.


To the contrary, it shows how impotent internal Xbox studios used to be as only one of them (Turn 10) has an engine which they iterate and scale with their subsequent hardware releases. That's one of the main reasons many Xbox games will never look like true first-party titles. I mean, UE5 is fine but the fact that it's multiplatform means it'll never utilize any given hardware to the fullest. For that you need a dedicated engine.



Global Illumination is the general term for many raytracing solutions, from what I know. Full path tracing (like in Minecraft) is just one of those techniques and it's interesting to see how devs try to avoid it like a plague. I think that Sony (and also Epic) never wanted RT but they got it in the RDNA2 "package" from AMD so there it is. I imagine the second or third wave of games might try to use it for small improvements like mirrors and window reflections but it'll be minimal. This is the streaming generation, not raytracing one, which I'm quite glad for after seeing the horrible AMD demo. Nvidia has better ideas for RT so far.
I think global illuminations which have realistic bounce lighting and other forms of dynamic light would be a neat addition on many PS5 exclusives, especially games like Uncharted 4 which would have benefited greatly from more accurate and dynamic forms of lighting wether they are hardware accelerated or from the engine.
 
Speaking of raytracing on XSX, it's a weird thing. There are two sources I know of which show it in Minecradt. One is Digital Foundry who analyse a video provided by Microsoft so I'm going to skip that one. The other is that Austin Evans guy who was the other outlet revealing the console. His video is really weird and it all starts around the 2m44s mark.



He shows Minecraft RT running on XSX but we can see it's not the same tower box he shows in the same video, it's a devbox (in fact, there are 3 stacked next to the TV). So he starts talking about RT but walks around in the normal mode, then stops, switches to RT and... just turns around. I don't get it at all - why not walk around showing the graphics? Those are just 1-2 second periods when we see the image moving, then a cut to the video provided by Microsoft, then another take at RT-less walking and again the same procedure. I don't buy it at all.


Well, I'm not quite as skeptical but for a different reason. Look, Minecraft is a pretty basic game graphic wise. But with RT on, they don't even hit a stable 30 FPS. Now the video and marketing are obviously trying to drum up excitement by suggesting that if they got all this coolness added to MINECRAFT with ray tracing, just think what Gears 5 or other games will look like! But the fact is..again, Minecraft is a basic game. There's a WORLD of difference between what you need for Minecraft versus what you need for Gears, for example. I think what this truly shows is that raytracing is NOT going to be widely or heavily used this generation. I think it will be used on a very limited basis, if at all. Because the hardware just isn't powerful enough yet.

Interestingly, I think what Sony has done with the I/O on the SSD is in large part because of this fact. The hardware to make raytracing a really big deal is out of reach, so Sony went the route of making it possible to like the UE5 demo...stream in movie class assets directly. It's a way to vastly improve quality without requiring levels of GPU power that just aren't practical yet. At least that's my theory.

As for the Series X and ray tracing, I'm sure there will be more cool demos highlighting that. But I will be very surprised if more modern and advanced games use anywhere near the level of RT that Minecraft did.

Hopefully we'll start seeing more about all of this and about both the Series X and PS5 with real gameplay and other demos starting here in the next couple of weeks!
 
Global Illumination is the general term for many raytracing solutions, from what I know. Full path tracing (like in Minecraft) is just one of those techniques and it's interesting to see how devs try to avoid it like a plague. I think that Sony (and also Epic) never wanted RT but they got it in the RDNA2 "package" from AMD so there it is. I imagine the second or third wave of games might try to use it for small improvements like mirrors and window reflections but it'll be minimal. This is the streaming generation, not raytracing one, which I'm quite glad for after seeing the horrible AMD demo. Nvidia has better ideas for RT so far.
Honestly all i want RT for this gen is good GI and ambient occlusion, all we need to get that extra lighting push towards cgi.
I feel reflections have been faked well enough with SSR and cubemaps that RT reflections won't be as noticeable.
 
Speaking of raytracing on XSX, it's a weird thing. There are two sources I know of which show it in Minecradt. One is Digital Foundry who analyse a video provided by Microsoft so I'm going to skip that one. The other is that Austin Evans guy who was the other outlet revealing the console. His video is really weird and it all starts around the 2m44s mark.



He shows Minecraft RT running on XSX but we can see it's not the same tower box he shows in the same video, it's a devbox (in fact, there are 3 stacked next to the TV). So he starts talking about RT but walks around in the normal mode, then stops, switches to RT and... just turns around. I don't get it at all - why not walk around showing the graphics? Those are just 1-2 second periods when we see the image moving, then a cut to the video provided by Microsoft, then another take at RT-less walking and again the same procedure. I don't buy it at all.

Well, I'm not quite as skeptical but for a different reason. Look, Minecraft is a pretty basic game graphic wise. But with RT on, they don't even hit a stable 30 FPS. Now the video and marketing are obviously trying to drum up excitement by suggesting that if they got all this coolness added to MINECRAFT with ray tracing, just think what Gears 5 or other games will look like! But the fact is..again, Minecraft is a basic game. There's a WORLD of difference between what you need for Minecraft versus what you need for Gears, for example. I think what this truly shows is that raytracing is NOT going to be widely or heavily used this generation. I think it will be used on a very limited basis, if at all. Because the hardware just isn't powerful enough yet.

Interestingly, I think what Sony has done with the I/O on the SSD is in large part because of this fact. The hardware to make raytracing a really big deal is out of reach, so Sony went the route of making it possible to like the UE5 demo...stream in movie class assets directly. It's a way to vastly improve quality without requiring levels of GPU power that just aren't practical yet. At least that's my theory.

As for the Series X and ray tracing, I'm sure there will be more cool demos highlighting that. But I will be very surprised if more modern and advanced games use anywhere near the level of RT that Minecraft did.

Hopefully we'll start seeing more about all of this and about both the Series X and PS5 with real gameplay and other demos starting here in the next couple of weeks!


Agree with both. I was not convinced that it was best way to showcase Ray tracing capabilities from MS. It was either not very stable or not very optimised yet to be able to roam around freely.

I'm staying in Team - Wait for the consoles and games to release before I judge the capabilities.
 
Agree with both. I was not convinced that it was best way to showcase Ray tracing capabilities from MS. It was either not very stable or not very optimised yet to be able to roam around freely.

I'm staying in Team - Wait for the consoles and games to release before I judge the capabilities.
Showing Mincraft as a 'beacon' of gaming to the hardcore is just another Microsoftisim.

The most casual game with the most hardcore features, who was it for?
 
Damn. Tom's Hardware is was the most reliable PC website I could think of. Internet's hit the bottom very hard.


To the contrary, it shows how impotent internal Xbox studios used to be as only one of them (Turn 10) has an engine which they iterate and scale with their subsequent hardware releases. That's one of the main reasons many Xbox games will never look like true first-party titles. I mean, UE5 is fine but the fact that it's multiplatform means it'll never utilize any given hardware to the fullest. For that you need a dedicated engine.



Global Illumination is the general term for many raytracing solutions, from what I know. Full path tracing (like in Minecraft) is just one of those techniques and it's interesting to see how devs try to avoid it like a plague. I think that Sony (and also Epic) never wanted RT but they got it in the RDNA2 "package" from AMD so there it is. I imagine the second or third wave of games might try to use it for small improvements like mirrors and window reflections but it'll be minimal. This is the streaming generation, not raytracing one, which I'm quite glad for after seeing the horrible AMD demo. Nvidia has better ideas for RT so far.

Tom's Hardware was a nasty surprise for me as well, I've been reading their articles for a long time, but this just proved that you can't fix stupid all over again.

Even the article was short, bitter, hastily put together. I wonder if their journalists can publish whatever they want, when they want, or is there a news editor in the real sense of the word?

Anyway, they're weak and pathetic, just like the rest, scared that their PC world has been turned upside down and inside out.
 
Agree with both. I was not convinced that it was best way to showcase Ray tracing capabilities from MS. It was either not very stable or not very optimised yet to be able to roam around freely.

I'm staying in Team - Wait for the consoles and games to release before I judge the capabilities.
That's my point. I personally don't believe RT will be useful next gen but it's not about my preferences. I'm saying that from what we've seen, we can't really confirm that Minecraft RT works on XSX just like it does on Windows 10 (public beta, hundreds of videos of people using it, benchmarks, etc.). Path raytracing on consoles hasn't been really shown yet, in general.

I think global illuminations which have realistic bounce lighting and other forms of dynamic light would be a neat addition on many PS5 exclusives, especially games like Uncharted 4 which would have benefited greatly from more accurate and dynamic forms of lighting wether they are hardware accelerated or from the engine.
Uncharted 4 uses several forms of GI techniques, for example for flashlights in dark spaces, caustics, subsurface scattering, etc. In fact, I think the first console game I've seen caustics in was UC2.
 
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It's a round large number to refer to any game's data files, intended to sound technical and impress people. Marketing involves a lot of that.

The only way that this makes any sense to me is that they are referring to the seek time advantage of SSD compared to HDD.

No that's not what they're referring to.

It's a 100gb of "virtual memory" - no need to access it via the file system of the flash drive.

Which raises the question about games larger than 100gb. COD is currently nearly 200gb. Presumably the devs would have to get their hands dirty positioning things In the installed 100gb of RAM if they want to achieve the fastest access times ...
 
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Maybe you guys can answer this about XSX.

How is this magical 100gb instantly accessible yet it relies on the ssd and io speed? Is it instantly readable but transferring is a whole different story?

The ssd speed is one thing but the bottlenecks Cerny mentioned in ssd's, he said there are a lot, which is why they have that custom io hardware.

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People keep saying its 4.8gb/s that the xbox can use...surely that's assuming all bottlenecks are dealt with and that ssd speed is 100% transferable to the other end of the pipeline. Surely the Xbox cannot avoid those bottlenecks if unaddressed so it will slow further if not eliminated? (And it doesn't have that same io hardware so.....)

If it is using software, given the ps5 is using a good few zen 2 cores worth of processing in its io, not inc kraken, will this not be a hit the the XSX CPU to do things that way?
I assume it is something like this, Dx12U uses IDs for textures and up to 100GB of the IDs assigned are known exactly where it is stored but the access is still limited to compress and decompress speed so 2.4GB/s if they are raw, 4.8GB/s if compressed. Anything other than that 100GB might not be assigned any IDs and thus accessible for virtualization of textures. I don't know why a limit like that exists but it is pure speculation based on the official xbox blog. Also do not assume those GB/s figures are when all the bottlenecks are dealt with, since bottlenecks are something akin to latency and hitches and where hw waits for other things to finish first or hides this wait by doing other things while waiting. Think of bottlenecks as a police telling you to stop even though the lights are green. Those speeds are when you can stream ideally unstopped but bottlenecks are the places you have to stop and wait. AFAIK PS5 had removed all those bottlenecks with specific hw pieces that manage coherency and DMA which is completely offloaded from the CPU. It seems XSX still has CPU to manage those operations and maybe more storage related stuff except for decompression on its cycles and this creates latency where active thread shifts and waits. I assume that is why there is a limit of 100GB that you can use those speeds (and btw when they say instantaneous it is these raw & compressed speeds they mean) anything involving an asset or texture outside of that 100GB won't be using those speed figures, and there will be a penalty, maybe a giant hitch that happens sometime in the last gen when you are transferring between bounds and a whole lot of other assets need to be cached to RAM from the disk and current RAM is scrubbed.

Finished with the cheap shots? OK, take a big breath, relaxed yet? Maybe look at a picture of Mark Cerny for 30 seconds, I've heard it's relaxing.

You literally see polygon stream in over a course of over 10 frames regardless of shadow jitter. The demo uses micro polygons, right? That detail is 100% polygons, normal maps are only used for extremely fine detail, not for detail covering 200 pixels. It's not even shadows that are missing after a camera cut, it's the GI that is missing because no data was gathered yet and the data missing isn't poping in the second frame, even after the GI kicked in. Go to the video, bring 10 screenshots of the first 10 frames, and show everyone how shadow jitter causes it. Common, we are waiting.

TBH, I think I'm done here. It's extremely hard to have a mature discussion.
You got your tail between your legs now haven't you. GI and shadows are the same thing silly! And polygons do not stream in, let alone it taking as long as 10 frames(are you for real??). Level of detail change is ONLY dependent upon distance and except for the flying session you can not catch any level of detail change with your eyes. And nowhere in the demo you see %100 of polygons, that statue is 33 million polys and the screen only renders 20 million at at time in any frame, so even as the character gets close to that one statue in the first area, it is rendered with a LOD that gives the total screen 20 million polys, but the changes between LODs are seamless now. It used to be a content manager created LODs like 1 million poly->1 meter and less, 500K poly->2m-5m, 200K poly->5m-10m, 50K->10m-20m and anything above 20m it is gone, not even rendered so that the game hits a certain draw call limit, a hard ceiling limit that vanishes any asset above certain distance, a literal pop-in. Now the engine manages those seamlessly and not in a stupid step by step way, more intelligently so that there is literally no pop-in, there is no distance limit that vanishes assets.
Why don't YOU "Go to the video, bring 10 screenshots of the first 10 frames, and show everyone how shadow jitter causes it."? You are the one that likes picture comparisons and first came with a claim so burden lies with you! I just shot down your theory I'm not claiming anything, anything other than facts so if you now claim 10 frames level of detail change, let's see those screen captures. "Common, we are waiting."
 
Wtf is the title related to content? Oo
And again who said PS5 will outperformed the Serie X?
It's like all site want the console to be fueled each day that's weird!

The general idea floating around is that Xbox somehow MUST be better than Playstation, no matter the circumstances. Not the other way around, EVER.

It's ok, I can live with that and I am sure a lot of Playstation users can live with that; I don't really see how there'll be a massive shifting in user base, if at all, just because marketing talk which is stunted anyway. As I am almost as convinced that Xbox users will not jump in bed with Sony, because some people thought UE5 will not run just as good on their console of choice.

People seem to easily forget that most Xbox/Playstation users have been in their own eco-systems for years and years, granted, there are people easily swayed one side or another, but most players are here to stay, with their own console. Or a lot of them use them both.

So making waves, hoping that anything of note will happen to their respective users is just simply not paying attention to previous generations; most players are in their own walled gardens, and they will stay there.

Click bait press will be click bait press - they will not sell more, they will not be read more, but they will lose face with their stupid and uneducated assumptions.
 
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Whatever this 100gb is it can't be that good as a lot of dev opinions still put the ps5 way ahead in that area...

So my question again without the specific io hardware how does xbox potential use that 100gb and does it cost the cpu performance? Everything io in ps5 is taken care of and the cpu free isnt it?

For a normal SSD drive there is a Flash File System which handles the configuration and Organization of stored data. When the system wishes to access data from the SSD, it makes the request for a logical data file (think of it as folder path and a file name), the FFS works out where the data is physically stored (a "lookup" operation), and reads the data from the physical storage location (chip x, row y, column z) into the designated RAM location.

That's often too slow or memory limited for big files in which case the FFS will return a file handle and the system will read data via this handle and the FFS as required.

The 100gb the Xsex has is different. It is accessed via a memory operation as would happen for data in RAM. It's "virtual memory" - a concept decades old - but applied to the SSD. Presumably devs can do all the normal things with it they would with memory - pointer arithmetic, dynamic data structure storage and manipulation and so on. This is very nice since it means devs can write fast code without having to worry too much about excessive data sizes and pushing higher priority stuff out of RAM.

It's also faster access because the FFS is bypassed - this is the "instant access" claim in the text. Its still being accessed on the Xsex about 200 times slower than VRAM though.

Also there's the problem of what happens when a game exceeds 100gb of data - COD is currently 200gb just about. Presumably data outside the 100gb requires FFS based transfers introducing an access time overhead.
 
The Unreal 5 Demo on the PS5 Used Software Ray-Tracing Similar to ReShade's Ray-Tracing Shader (Ray Traced GI)

Daniel Wright, the Technical Director of Graphics at Epic, said:

Lumen uses ray tracing to solve indirect lighting, but not triangle ray tracing. Lumen traces rays against a scene representation consisting of signed distance fields, voxels, and height fields. As a result, it requires no special ray tracing hardware.

Lumen uses a combination of different techniques to efficiently trace rays. Screen-space traces handle tiny details, mesh signed distance field traces handle medium-scale light transfer and voxel traces handle large scale light transfer.

The thing is, this way of doing ray tracing is totally dependent on having very fast IO solution, it always was. But the VRAM sizes of the GPUs were never enough to store everything, and HDDs were too slow. Even SSDs with SATA is too slow. It took nvme PCI 4.0 SSDs and custom flash controllers to achieve this way of doing ray traced GI and this can be so much better on the performance compared to crushing hw RT. But since this method isn't using the available hw for RT but still producing really believable lighting, hw for RT can bu used to supplant where this method isn't working so great, like the screen space reflections to produce even better visuals, instead of letting those RT cores lie dormant it can be used for additional corrections on top of software RT.
 
So... now some Xbox people are saying Geoff is a Sony fanboy because he made clear the Unreal Engine 5 demo was running on PS5. Oh, man, things are getting crazier everyday
 
The thing is, this way of doing ray tracing is totally dependent on having very fast IO solution, it always was. But the VRAM sizes of the GPUs were never enough to store everything, and HDDs were too slow. Even SSDs with SATA is too slow. It took nvme PCI 4.0 SSDs and custom flash controllers to achieve this way of doing ray traced GI and this can be so much better on the performance compared to crushing hw RT. But since this method isn't using the available hw for RT but still producing really believable lighting, hw for RT can bu used to supplant where this method isn't working so great, like the screen space reflections to produce even better visuals, instead of letting those RT cores lie dormant it can be used for additional corrections on top of software RT.
How on Earth is the SSD related to the GI solution described in the article?
 
So... now some Xbox people are saying Geoff is a Sony fanboy because he made clear the Unreal Engine 5 demo was running on PS5. Oh, man, things are getting crazier everyday

The unreal engine 5 demo caused few fanboys to lose it. Like wtf ? Its a multiplatform engine. Xsx and ps5 both have their strengths . Get whatever u like and be happy.
 
The unreal engine 5 demo caused few fanboys to lose it. Like wtf ? Its a multiplatform engine. Xsx and ps5 both have their strengths . Get whatever u like and be happy.
The PS5 MUST NOT HAVE ANY STRENGTHS. I don't actually give a shit how powerful the Xbox SEX is! I will only feel good if the PS5 is weaker than an Atari 2600!!!1!
 
This is the kind of toxic community the likes of Greenberg encourage.
I remember reading on twitter last week someone mentioning Colt, Dealer and some others about how Microsoft should hire them to promote the Xbox Series X. And this week Aaron acknowledge Colt's work.... this scares me a little about what it could mean.

The unreal engine 5 demo caused few fanboys to lose it. Like wtf ? Its a multiplatform engine. Xsx and ps5 both have their strengths . Get whatever u like and be happy.
Yes, I think pretty much everyone has already accepted both PS5 and XSX will have its advantages and disadvantages but some people really want to make the other platform look like the worst device ever made.
 
The PS5 MUST NOT HAVE ANY STRENGTHS. I don't actually give a shit how powerful the Xbox SEX is! I will only feel good if the PS5 is weaker than an Atari 2600!!!1!
Dealer ,tim dog , Windows central and the rest over hyped the 18% power difference to the moon and back by saying xsx will have double frame rate quadruple the resolution ,etc,.... . So when the reality hits that both are great console and close with their own strengths, its rough on them and this is how they react .cause they believed some false narrative and it keeps getting shattered and that causes people to act this way . Calling everyone and every dev fanboy when they have nice things to say about ps5 cause based on their fake info ps5 was supposed to be a weak ass system.
 
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Cerny had said before RT wouldn't be the main focus this gen but nobody listened.

I might yet be proven wrong, but path tracing is simply too expensive ATM.
 
Cerny had said before RT wouldn't be the main focus this gen but nobody listened.

I might yet be proven wrong, but path tracing is simply too expensive ATM.


When you see the problem to get a correct framerate due to RT power raw consumption on GPU card which exceed 600$, it's easily understandable.
 
The Unreal 5 Demo on the PS5 Used Software Ray-Tracing Similar to ReShade's Ray-Tracing Shader (Ray Traced GI)

Daniel Wright, the Technical Director of Graphics at Epic, said:

Lumen uses ray tracing to solve indirect lighting, but not triangle ray tracing. Lumen traces rays against a scene representation consisting of signed distance fields, voxels, and height fields. As a result, it requires no special ray tracing hardware.

Lumen uses a combination of different techniques to efficiently trace rays. Screen-space traces handle tiny details, mesh signed distance field traces handle medium-scale light transfer and voxel traces handle large scale light transfer.


Well, surely it's not so demanding like full path ray tracing.
 
I wonder when one of the tech sites like Anandtech are going to do a review of the tech in these consoles? Seems really weird they haven't yet. It would clear so much up about the full I/O situation and how it could even push the PC space forward. I'm really fed up of reading/watching things like the above RDX video where they're completely oblivious to the I/O after the SSD.

SSD/decompression is all they talk about and often incorrectly. At one point they are talking about 7.2 gigabits/s! on XSX with one of them trying to correct it? They're so out of their depth and I'm saying that as someone that considers myself to be in the deep end....To be fair there are even some tech savvy people that seem to be bamboozled right now with the full picture so the above isn't too much of a surprise I guess.

My head hurts.
 
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Cerny had said before RT wouldn't be the main focus this gen but nobody listened.

I might yet be proven wrong, but path tracing is simply too expensive ATM.

I'm not so sure about that.
Nvidias AI advancements should'nt be underestimated.

If they can render a game in 540P/1080P with full raytracing features and upscale that to 4K people problably won't even notice it.
I do belive raytracing will be possible 1-3 years from now hardware wise. However that might depend how you use it.
For this gen RT hardware acceleration wasn't yet mature enough.
 
The Minecraft demo may not be particularly impressive as a result of its rudimentary style but it is very impressive as a demonstration of the tech, even at ~1080/30. It's not just one or two ray tracing effects layered in with variable quality. But full end to end path tracing (only rasterized thing is particles); Global Illumination derived from the Sun, Sky & multiple other light sources with indirect diffuse and specular illumination, per-pixel emissive lighting, hard and soft general/contact/ambient shadows and reflections. Not to mention obstacles/bounces include stained glass, water, ice, volumetric fog, light shafts and lava.

In second and third wave titles on PS5/XSX, I expect we'll only see a couple of these effects deployed to supplement the image in any given piece of software. Given the fixed specs I also expect to see a tonne of workarounds and optimisation.

You could use screen space and plug the leaks for off screen and occluded assets with RT; basically using RT as a fall back. You can inject temporal reconstruction into reflections themselves. You can massively vary the quality/sampling and even update rate of reflections based on surface roughness, surface angle and distance from the camera; and this variability can be achieved frame-by-frame. There are almost certainly other approaches to leverage the RT hardware we haven't thought of yet.

It's worth noting the highly dynamic nature of modern console and pc featuresets. We'll have dynamic res scaling + temporal reconstruction, variable rate shading, mesh shaders etc. all varying and working as an inverse to each other, so you can effectively scale one thing one way to make another thing possible.

It's not just a case of performing optimisations and finding new ways to use the tech, but having the incentive to do so in terms of having the hardware as a baseline and wanting to make use of every available feature to fully utilise the silicon at your disposal; as well as having the financial incentive. Not to mention the time/workload incentive, for an artist or technical artist, RT just works so if it can be implemented as the only approach across a PS5/XSX/PC, you may have a lot to gain productively. RTX is the only RT RT we've had so far and it's been limited to a few FX in a handful of titles on PC.

It's still very early days for RT but it'll find its legs.
 
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The Minecraft demo may not be particularly impressive as a result of its rudimentary style but it is very impressive as a demonstration of the tech, even at ~1080/30. It's not just one or two ray tracing effects layered in with variable quality. But full end to end path tracing (only rasterized thing is particles); Global Illumination derived from the Sun, Sky & multiple other light sources with indirect diffuse and specular illumination, per-pixel emissive lighting, hard and soft general/contact/ambient shadows and reflections. Not to mention obstacles/bounces include stained glass, water, ice, volumetric fog, light shafts and lava.

It's massively less computationally costly to add ray-tracing to a voxel grid of regular cubes like in Minecraft. It also allows you to cull off screen geometry without it affecting lighting as you can query a simple data-structure to see what would be there.

Full "path tracing" in Minecraft is not at all representative of the same thing happening in a more typical game. Full path tracing in Minecraft at 1080P/30Hz is very poor performance, but there are versions made by the community that run better.

I'm a big fan of accumulating solutions like Lumen. Spread the cost over multiple frames, and it kind of almost looks like eyes adjusting, and isn't too jarring. We don't need to aim for per-frame perfection if the cost is not having it at all.

After hearing that ray-traced audio video of music playing in a large room that Bo_Hazem Bo_Hazem posted, I'm now more excited about the impact it can have on audio at very little cost.
 
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I know I already mentioned this yesterday but I haven't seen any news outlets talk about this so far. One of the Sony Flagship Projects for AI is gaming so we could be seeing a lot of AI related stuff in PS5, not just a voice/virtual assistant but also machine and deep learning stuff.

PsUOPcC.png
 
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The PS5 MUST NOT HAVE ANY STRENGTHS. I don't actually give a shit how powerful the Xbox SEX is! I will only feel good if the PS5 is weaker than an Atari 2600!!!1!

It really seems a lot of "raving rabbids" ate their morning cereals with tears instead of milk. Frustration is real.
 
Dealer ,tim dog , Windows central and the rest over hyped the 18% power difference to the moon and back by saying xsx will have double frame rate quadruple the resolution ,etc,.... . So when the reality hits that both are great console and close with their own strengths, its rough on them and this is how they react .cause they believed some false narrative and it keeps getting shattered and that causes people to act this way . Calling everyone and every dev fanboy when they have nice things to say about ps5 cause based on their fake info ps5 was supposed to be a weak ass system.

Well, when official figureheads from Microsoft don't do anything at all to calm down the rabid throng of delusional people, what else do you expect? On the contrary, even.
 
The Minecraft demo may not be particularly impressive as a result of its rudimentary style but it is very impressive as a demonstration of the tech, even at ~1080/30. It's not just one or two ray tracing effects layered in with variable quality. But full end to end path tracing (only rasterized thing is particles); Global Illumination derived from the Sun, Sky & multiple other light sources with indirect diffuse and specular illumination, per-pixel emissive lighting, hard and soft general/contact/ambient shadows and reflections. Not to mention obstacles/bounces include stained glass, water, ice, volumetric fog, light shafts and lava.

In second and third wave titles on PS5/XSX, I expect we'll only see a couple of these effects deployed to supplement the image in any given piece of software. Given the fixed specs I also expect to see a tonne of workarounds and optimisation.

You could use screen space and plug the leaks for off screen and occluded assets with RT; basically using RT as a fall back. You can inject temporal reconstruction into reflections themselves. You can massively vary the quality/sampling and even update rate of reflections based on surface roughness, surface angle and distance from the camera; and this variability can be achieved frame-by-frame. There are almost certainly other approaches to leverage the RT hardware we haven't thought of yet.

It's worth noting the highly dynamic nature of modern console and pc featuresets. We'll have dynamic res scaling + temporal reconstruction, variable rate shading, mesh shaders etc. all varying and working as an inverse to each other, so you can effectively scale one thing one way to make another thing possible.

It's not just a case of performing optimisations and finding new ways to use the tech, but having the incentive to do so in terms of having the hardware as a baseline and wanting to make use of every available feature to fully utilise the silicon at your disposal; as well as having the financial incentive. Not to mention the time/workload incentive, for an artist or technical artist, RT just works so if it can be implemented as the only approach across a PS5/XSX/PC, you may have a lot to gain productively. RTX is the only RT RT we've had so far and it's been limited to a few FX in a handful of titles on PC.

It's still very early days for RT but it'll find its legs.
John Linneman was hitting 60 fps with a 2080ti so how is 30fps impressive ?
 
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