Comment by JoshTriplett
3 days ago
After raytracing, the next obvious massive improvement would be path tracing.
And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually.
One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.
There is no real difference between "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing", or better, the former is just the operation of intersecting a ray with a scene (and not a rendering technique), the latter is a way to solve the integral to approximate the rendering equation (hence, it could be considered a rendering technique). Sure, you can go back to the terminology used by Kajiya in his earlier works etc etc, but it was only a "academic terminology game" which is worthless today. Today, the former is accelerated by HW since around a decade (I am cunting the PowerVR wizard). The latter is how most of non-realtime rendering renders frames.
You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
> You can not have "Path Tracing" in games
It seems like you're deliberately ignoring the terminology currently widely used in the gaming industry.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-path...
https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-pa...
(And any number of other sources, those are just the first two I found.)
If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.
> If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.
It is not incorrect because, at least for now, all those "path tracing" modes do not do compute multiple "paths" (with each being made of multiple rays casted) per pixel but rasterize primary rays and then either fire 1 [in rare occasions, 2] rays for such a pixel, or, more often, read a value from a local special cache called a "reservoir" or from a radiance cache - which is sometimes a neural network. All of this goes even against the defition your first article gives itself of path tracing :D
I don't have problems with many people calling it "path tracing" in the same way I don't have issues with many (more) people calling Chrome "Google" or any browser "the internet", but if one wants to talk about future trends in computing (or is posting on hacker news!) I believe it's better to indicate a browser as a browser, Google as a search engine, and Path Tracing as what it is.
You should state the definitions of terms you are using (which you still haven't done) in cases where they are disputed.