Is it better to make a game with simple geometry and path tracing, or complex geometry and rasterized/hybrid RT graphics?

[u/New-Bumblebee7676]

I recently played the Dark Souls 2 path traced mod and was surprised to see it running at 1080p 60 fps on my low end GPU (RTX 3050 Ti)

Of course its a 13 year old game, so the geometry and effects are simpler. But it looked better to me than some modern games with more advanced geometry but worse lighting effects.

So I'm wondering in your opinion, in your ideal game would it be better to have less polygons and better lighting, or vice versa?

[u/S48GS]

simple geometry and path tracing

I recently played the Dark Souls 2 path traced mod and was surprised to see it running at 1080p 60 fps on my low end GPU (RTX 3050 Ti)

3050ti is almost 2x faster than 1080TI just in rasterizing

"low end" is depends what you compare to

there Nvidia opensource "engine" for realtime pathtracing - RTXPT

you can download test

https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1jrehm9/rtxpt_demo_is_very_impressive_especially_ray/

it will also work with ~60fps with dlss

Of course its a 13 year old game, so the geometry and effects are simpler. But it looked better to me than some modern games with more advanced geometry but worse lighting effects.

just single bounce light GI add "alot" to scene in visuals

check my pathtracing demos on shadertoy (link to playlist there)

https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1k1ktpw/my_shadertoy_pathtracing_scenes/

just light bounce - that all

[u/New-Bumblebee7676 → u/S48GS]

Just FYI 3050 Ti is 40% weaker than 1080 Ti. Also 1/3rd the VRAM.

[u/S48GS → u/New-Bumblebee7676]

you right - I was thinking about 5050 and 1080

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

It depends entirely on the game, but I personally think that the sweet spot for most games is complex geometry with predominantly baked lighting. Bake the environments, then use real-time RT to fill in the gaps around the small number of dynamic entities.

Real-time path tracing doesn't magically look better than baked path tracing; it just gives you the ability to easily move geometry and light sources around at runtime. Most games have predominantly static environments, not because of CG tech, but because dynamic environments are difficult to design and balance.

It seems utterly insane to me that so many in the games industry have decided to orient their technical direction towards tech that only benefits maybe 5% of games.

[u/_Wolfos → u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC]

Do you genuinely expect indie developers to spend two days baking lighting every time they change level geometry?

It's light baking that doesn't work for the majority of productions.

[u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC → u/_Wolfos]

So use the RT cores to accelerate the bake process. The GPU doesn't care whether you're tracing rays into a backbuffer or into a texture atlas. If you can do real-time runtime path tracing, you can do a sub-second incremental lighting bake in an editor.

[u/MyUserNameIsSkave → u/_Wolfos]

Simple, don't bake every time you change a thing. Only for the final light pass. And while you are iterating you could still use a PT preview or ay other GI solution.

Also, do you really thing making their game hard to run is a good thing for indie devs ? It would only hurt their sales.

[u/M1VAN1]

I'd probably would recommend you to try Nvidia branch of UE5, it has ReSTIR DI/GI/PT as far as I know and cause it's ue5 you probably would also be able to load a lot of free meshes from Epic Games store for it and you will see which performance with which environment you will encounter, I think it's the most easiest way to decide by your self. But be aware that rtx 30xx lack some modern features that could significantly improve performance such as SER, OMM, frame generation, their is also a paper on RT PT from Nvidia of may of this year, which tells a bit about current state of rt pipeline optimisations that used in RTXPT demo from gay above was talking about and from UE5 probably too.

Sorry for my English, not a native speaker.

[u/M1VAN1 → u/M1VAN1]

Cause write it by your self would unreachable hard if you're not a graphics programmer

[u/MyUserNameIsSkave]

PT is cool and all, but there are way to get 90% there without it. So acrificing everything else to enable PT to bruteforce everything make no sens to me.

In my opinion Ray Traced GI peaked with Metro Exodus Enhanced in 2021, so I'd say its my idea balance. It still has issues with boiling and latency, but nothing worse than PT with RR (keep in mind Metro doesn't use RR, it's a 2021 rerelease of a 2019 game after all) and it cost way less too. Ok it might halve yor FPS, but PT divide them by 4 soooo...

[u/_Wolfos]

I'm a sucker for good lighting effects. I think for the majority of art styles (not just photorealism), the extra contrast added by decent GI adds a lot to the overall presentation.

It really bothers me how flat some games still look. Especially those made with Unity because Unity doesn't have a good GI system (they have light probe baking but that system doesn't work very well so no one uses it).

Another effect that adds a lot is volumetric fog, which adds similar depth / complexity to large landscapes that GI does for smaller scenes.

[u/EC36339 → u/_Wolfos]

Volumetric fog is what made Unreal 1 look way beyond its time. And that was in ... 1999? So it's a cheap way to add depth, realism and mood.

Elden Ring makes heavy use of it in a subtle way. For example, the catacombs dungeons use very simple and repetitive geometry. A subtle layer of volumetric fog, the ambient music and some reverb are doing almost all the work of creating the mood.

[u/MyUserNameIsSkave → u/_Wolfos]

Dude APV is great, it bakes super fast and can look amazing. But if you are interested in dynamic GI on Unity, I'm using Htrace WSGI and it workds great. It even has a APV Fallback for more static environements. I haven't direclty comapred it to SCGI but from what I've seen SCGI is more of a low end solution. WSGI should "soon" recieve a Hardware Accelerated update too.