Half-Life 1 with real-time path tracing
github.com
github.com
Edit: Found one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQCZTxzW6A0
Indeed very impressive. I'll try it now. I hope RTX performance keeps advancing so it's usable for ever more complex games.
Raytracing should be done on a dedicated PCIE device, as 3D rendering was done back in the day, which was a companion to a 2D SVGA.
It’s the Nvidia 4070Ti and Cyberpunk 2077 that makes me have hope in ray tracing. DLSS 3 and frame generation are wild stuff- it’s rendering a lower resolution than app sampling with AI shaders for this incredible performance that looks better than it should. It’s actually quite good at filling in details and making an already glorious Night City really come alive. I was looking at a generic control panel in it this evening and it looked pretty good, the got closer and could see the gauges, weathered labels below important buttons, and even the values the needles were pointing to.
The CPU, motherboard, 64GB RAM and a fancy watercooler were all had for $1000, and another $900 for the new GPU. According to Geekbench, it’s quite a bit faster than the latest Apple lineup too.
While that is quite a lot of money for quite a lot of people, for PC gaming I feel it’s incredibly reasonable, especially the amount of GPU I got, brand new. Good riddance, proof-of-work.
I am spoiled though. Today my 49 inch monitor arrived. I hooked it up and started playing Cyberpunk. I was getting 5120x1440 pushed at me 240 frames per second. I had no idea that I was at the last checkpoint of the game, and didn’t know what to come next. What happened next can be only be described as a great leap. I won’t soon forget it.
I think we have arrived.
Then, try running Terranigma on the SNES, or Garou on the Neo Geo. That's a huge leap from the 8 to 16 bits architecture change on graphics. Gameplay wise, I'd put The Firemen, Chrono Trigger, Ultima VII in PC... the peak for them. The graphical step to the 32 bits architecture peak it's astounding: Crysis, Half life 2. And, in terms of gameplay, with just the PSX you could play games simulating an entire town with an schedule in order to solve a mistery. In 3D. Mizzurna falls.
For a 64 bits architecture I'd expect a whole town being simulated in the way of Deadly Premonition or the previously mentioned Mizzurna Falls, (bear in mind that every NPC has a daily schedule over a week) and ofc with raytraced graphics and complex interactions between NPC's.
You can have that easily on text mode since the 16 bits PC's/Amiga's/Atari with Make It Good and a Z-Machine interpreter (Make It Good, a crime solving game), so with a 2^64 arch we should expect far more.
Actually simulates a more complex model of the state of the PC's physical health, injury/augmentation, and its resultant (dis)abilities with something more than an Int or two. I don't need anything crazy. I'd just be happy to see what Deus Ex had 23 years ago in more games...
Honestly I think we in general lack the imagination to ask, and product owners only seem to give people what they want. I understand Health needed to be a cheap data type when gaming norms were being established. That said, 99.98% of the oxygen in the game industry goes to visuals, audio, networking, physics, etc and its still HEALTH=100; MAX_HEALTH=100; IF HEALTH < 0 THEN GAME_OVER()
And if you pause to think about what a more realistic and dynamic health system looks like, you may realize its hard for you to think about. No, not because we need to do RigidBodies for Leukocytes or something. Its hard to think about, because 100/100 health, POWER UP, Respawn kind of thinking has actually started to make multiple generations of people have less connection with their bodies. And maybe then you start to know that if games did this better, we would actually feel better, do better... maybe.
Surely similar fidelity (in general) would be achievable with some god rays, bloom/HDR and other effects, SSAO, as well as detailed baked lightmaps, as well as some good texture work and bump/parallax mapping. Lots of this stuff could be convincingly "faked" or pre-rendered years ago, which was used to great effect!
While ray tracing is an impressive piece of technology, to me it feels like we're not trying as much to create quality/optimized assets in the first place (which is time consuming and can be expensive) but instead expect the engine tech itself to increasingly take over. There are absolutely areas where this makes sense (e.g. dynamic LOD) but generally this results in ever increasing requirements and filesizes and shorter time to market, which I think the industry could do without. Then again, gameplay appeals to me more than graphics in general, so I'm not really the target audience.
Teardown comes to mind as a game where the technology was used well, but otherwise I'm yet to see a game where I'd enjoy the effects at the expense of making my GPU struggle. Regardless, the project itself is cool!