Star Citizen dev not that enthusiastic about ray tracing

Posted on Tuesday, February 19 2019 @ 12:12 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
It's kinda funny how opinions about ray tracing have shifted. A decade ago real-time ray tracing was considered one of the must-haves for more realistic video games, but now that the technology is finally available (albeit in a less-than-perfect form), we're hearing more and more voices against it.

Ben Parry from Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium called real-time ray tracing a massive headache and a major time-sink, that will only provide subtle improvements if they get it right. Parry says RTX looks like fun, but at the moment the team has bigger priorities.
“It’s more likely to be a case of “We’ve got a test-bed scene for a ray-based environment lighting technique, it works for one type of light so far, here’s a list of things you can no longer safely have in a room without it breaking, with rough probabilities of how likely we are to work out a solution”

The added headache is that whatever we offered would have to be an “as well” feature rather than an “instead”, developing a feature for a single manufacturer’s top-end cards means also maintaining feature parity for everyone else’s hardware.”

Parry then expanded on what he meant with “as well”.

“Sorry yes, I should have been clearer. By “as well” I meant we’d have to maintain support for two modes:
1) A mode that uses raytracing (though probably not exclusively) in some way to get its results
2) A mode that doesn’t use raytracing, but can achieve a similar look without changing the art assets or lighting setup.

As an example, when we ported over the voxel fog, we intended for it to be an “as well” feature because it’s expensive to run, but eventually ran with it as an “instead” feature because it interprets the fog parameters totally differently, and drastically changes what does/doesn’t work in terms of light placement.”


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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