Possibilities for Future Ray-Tracing?

[Mxyl V]

Having seen some of NVIDIA's latest capabilities, I was wondering (certainly not now, but maybe in several years' time) whether a ray-tracing option could be possible for Dolphin. I'd come across a post from 2014 where an administrator said that ray-tracing, along with SSAO and other options, required changes to the game engine to the point where creating a new game would take less effort; however, modern versions of Ishiiruka (which I understand is distinct from Dolphin) include an option for SSAO, so I'm wondering if anything's changed in that regard that would (hypothetically) make ray-tracing a future possibility.

[JosJuice]

N​o​.

[Valmar]

SSAA x8 is good enough.

[JonnyH]

Raytracing isn't just a "better version of rasterization". It's a completely different rendering technique (and currently nowhere near the performance necessary to replace all uses of rasterization, and likely never will due to it being so much less efficient in some cases that don't really benefit from raytracing, so spending the extra power with no visual improvement isn't a winning strategy).

It has massively different interfaces needed to implement compared to rasterization (e.g. you require a retained version of the whole transformed scene, while rasterization can treat each polygon separately), it has significant restrictions and trade offs that mean trying to add it "After the fact" into an engine just doesn't make sense.

And that's before you get into the different art styles different techniques allow (or encourage), so can be part of the artistic direction.

[MayImilae]

SSAO can be applied if you have depth information. Which Ishiiruka kiiind of has, but it's rather hacky since not all games are going to expose that - many just render to a flat image, so any post effects would just see a single flat plane. That's why Dolphin doesn't have depth available to its post effects, it was just too unreliable. In those cases, yes, it would require game modification to do cleanly, or lots of dirty dirty hacks!

Raytracing is nothing like that though. There is zero chances of adding it in post since raytracing is all in worldspace. Depth information is not enough, you need full access to the scene and the game's renderer.

[Mxyl V]

Ah; that does make sense. Thanks for the explanations!

[sacco_belmonte]

I would say if Quake could get Ray Tracing why not Dolphin?

Did you guys see how MineCraft looks with Ray Tracing? I'm not a MineCraft user but oh boy RT adds so much realism to everything and since Dolphin uses very little GPU it seems like a great candidate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UROt_SJFjTA

[JosJuice]

(04-17-2019, 05:02 AM)sacco_belmonte Wrote: I would say if Quake could get Ray Tracing why not Dolphin?

Because they had to rewrite Quake's rendering engine to get it to work. Dolphin can't just automatically rewrite the rendering engine of every game it runs.

Anyway, this is an old thread, so please don't bump it.