What do you think to all these companies announcing their support on Blender over the last year or two? Pretty amazing to see so many companies seemingly just wake up to how important open source is.

I'd like to see other projects being the target of that mutually-beneficial PR boost as well. Yes, content creation is a fundamental aspect of lots of industries, so it's appropriate that Blender get funding from the people that benefit from it, but they aren't the only one. I expect Gimp or Godot could do with a shot in the arm, too, as well as infrastructure things like OpenSSL.

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Quoting: GuestI mean, I could. But I won't.

You could certainly try.

Getting bored by this now - carry on if you wish, but I'm stopping here.

Bye.

For the benefit of everyone else, let's assume that mirv is correct, and the game rasterises some static shadows for some reason, even though the authors say they don't, and even though they show how they generate shadow rays in their videos and extensive documentation, and shadow rays are just some more ray calculations when you've already set up your BVHs and found your intersection points, and so on; taking the position that those shadows are the important bit and everything else is just "some effects" would be... pretty silly.

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Quoting: GuestI mean, I'm only going by the talk of the nvidia engineer who was the primary guy behind the port. Obviously you know better, my mistake then.

More than you, it seems. You seem to have misinterpreted the video that you watched.

You could play it yourself, and look at the code, or just go by something like "Q2VKPT [External Link] is the first playable game that is entirely raytraced and efficiently simulates fully dynamic lighting in real-time, with the same modern techniques as used in the movie industry" and read the copious documentation and papers that Nvidia have put out about the renderer and how it works.

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Quoting: GuestNo, raytracing is overlaid on top of some other traditional techniques still. It does completely replace the lighting pass for example, but not all of the shadow passes.

It is all raytraced. Even the shadows.

That question of performance is also crucial. It's not something that can be ignored, because it directly impacts the code written.

That... doesn't make any sense. The performance issue is important, which is why you're only getting playable performance at 1080p on a game with relatively low scene complexity (given that it's 20 years old), and you're limited to ~10 rays per pixel so you need to use a denoiser. But an entirely raytraced game at "high definition" resolution at 60 fps exists, and has existed for two years.

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Quoting: GuestWell, it raytraces most of it for some effects then applies de-noising. A complete, 100% ray trace of everything at high frame rates and high resolution is still beyond the cards.

No, it raytraces all of it. It uses fewer rays per pixel than you would if you were doing a non-interactive render, which is where the denoiser comes in. You can turn off the denoiser and it's still perfectly playable, just with a noisy image. Being able to increase the rays per pixel enough so that you don't need the denoiser is just a question of performance from here, not a change in technique. Only the HUD isn't raytraced.

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Quoting: tuubiThat's fine, but the difference is that you were raytracing a whole scene. These extensions make it possible to add some fidelity and realism to lighting and reflections using specialized RT shaders, but that's about all we can expect at this point. We're still far from fully raytraced games, if that's even the goal.

Quake 2 RTX raytraces the whole scene. 60 times per second.

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Quoting: ZapporAnd I guess that's a big no on AMD since it checks that you're running the correct Nvidia driver version:

That check doesn't do what you think it does: if you're using Windows, and if you've got an Nvidia card, and if you don't have ray tracing support (using either extension) Nvidia can tell you the minimum required driver version number in the error message.

People have already posted videos of themselves playing the game on AMD cards with drivers that expose the extension.

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Quoting: ageresIt's just a line of text or two, isn't it?

It's an extra 11% of vertical space.

The black bars that you're concerned about: it's exactly that much.

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Quoting: LordDaveTheKindThis approach was real 10 years ago. It has changed nowadays

No. They've included the (proprietary) library with their (proprietary) driver, exactly as I said. What they haven't done, and aren't likely to, is help open source projects - like vkd3d or Q2RTX - make any use of that. I'd like it if it were different, but it isn't.

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Quoting: ikirutoI think if Nvidia herself takes on helping the developers of VKD3D, then anything is possible. But this is fantastic. :)

Nvidia had the opportunity to create a means to utilise the DLSS library that they include with their driver in their own open source game, and they explicitly refused to.

It's entirely within their means to be more helpful, but they don't want to; that's why lots of people have a low opinion of them.

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