Raytracing

[Gopi Passiflora]

This may be a stupid question, but can Second Life support raytracing? Just wondering.

The reason why I ask is because I'm getting a new graphics card (RTX 4070, which is capable of raytracing). Even if RT is not possible in SL, I want to see how the graphics card improves the graphics in SL over my current GTX 1660 Super.

[Stephanie Misfit]

1 minute ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

This may be a stupid question, but can Second Life support raytracing? Just wondering.

The reason why I ask is because I'm getting a new graphics card (RTX 4070, which is capable of raytracing). Even if RT is not possible in SL, I want to see how the graphics card improves the graphics in SL over my current GTX 1660 Super.

No.

[Gopi Passiflora]

1 minute ago, Stephanie Misfit said:

No.

Ah, thanks for the answer.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

WHAT is "ray tracing"?

(Asking for a friend. Because of course *I* know!)

[Gopi Passiflora]

Just now, Scylla Rhiadra said:

WHAT is "ray tracing"?

(Asking for a friend. Because of course *I* know!)

This wikipedia article (yes, I know) provides an explanation. In short, it's a rendering technique that improves graphics I guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)

[Love Zhaoying]

Interesting to me is, back when I was in college, "ray tracing" required "supercomputers"!

EDIT: Gopi beat me to posting the Wikipedia link.

I'd say, ray tracing purports to follow the "tracing" of light "rays", to better and more accurately render reflections, etc.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Love Zhaoying

[diamond Marchant]

Quote

Pixar’s first fully-ray-traced movie, Monsters Inc. took two years to render.

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

This may be a stupid question

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

2 hours ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

I want to see how the graphics card improves the graphics in SL over my current GTX 1660 Super.

No improvement whatsoever, all it might do is render SL at a higher frame rate, or allow a higher resolution  if your monitor supports one, but realistically, the 4070 is overkill for SL, shoving that RTX card into your existing PC won't change the real handicaps too SL, that is the chokepoint that is the CPU.

 

If you bought a 4070 to "make SL look prettier", you wasted your money, if you bought it to "play leet games released in the last two years on Steam" then you didn't.

[Ted McGregor]

3 hours ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

This may be a stupid question, but can Second Life support raytracing? Just wondering.

Yes. Well, kinda. Rays of light are calculated and surfaces respond to this by reflections. Physical Based Rendering (PBR) depends on it and is currently being released, if only with alpha's in case of certain 3rd party viewers. NVidia's RTX range has built-in hardware ( tensa-cores ), which, amongst other functions, help in calculating these reflections of light on surfaces.

 

PBR examples in SL ( not true raytracing )

3 hours ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

The reason why I ask is because I'm getting a new graphics card (RTX 4070, which is capable of raytracing). Even if RT is not possible in SL, I want to see how the graphics card improves the graphics in SL over my current GTX 1660 Super.

You would need to try this with a viewer supporting PBR with both cards. You'd see a noticeable difference.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Ted McGregor

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 hours ago, Gopi Passiflora said:

This wikipedia article (yes, I know) provides an explanation. In short, it's a rendering technique that improves graphics I guess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)

It's a bit more complicated than that.

 

First the virtual camera in the scene divides up it's field of view into squares equal to the desired pixel output resolution. Say 1920 x 1080 for example.

Then it fires a buckshot shotgun blast of "trace rays" through each virtual pixel square on the grid, one by one, to see if any of the rays hit a "bounding box" for an object, if a ray does hit a bounding box, it reports that and carries on in case there are other bounding boxes behind or inside the first, until it hits the backdrop, or exceeds it's "max trace depth".

Then for every pixel with one or more bounding boxes in it, it fires a birdshot shotgun blast (a lot more rays)) to see what actual polygons are in there, and what colour they are and what surface finish, and if they are see through, and which direction they face, and what light sources illuminate them etc. These rays also plough on through see through objects, or bounce of reflective objects, to the "max trace depth" reporting each surface they hit.

From the reports, the engine works out the FINAL colour of the first surface hit by the ray, then averages together all the final colours of all the birdshot shotgun blast of rays, to get the final average colour of that pixel..

Then it moves on to the next pixel in that 1920 x 1080 image.

 

And that is BASIC ray tracing, not including fancy stuff like "energy conservation" where you check to see if the light hitting one polygon and bouncing off, hits another polygon and changes it's apparent colour. THAT adds a whole new pile of calculations to the mess. There's also "image based lighting, HDRI, env reflection maps, normal maps, vertex normals, surface normals, 3d volumetric shaders, etc., etc., etc.

 

And for a "game" you want to do that 30 or 60 times a second.

 

[Zalificent Corvinus]

11 minutes ago, Ted McGregor said:

You would need to try this with a viewer supporting PBR with both cards. You'd see a noticeable difference.

The RTX still needs a specific client rendering engine system, that passes it the info it needs to do the ray tracing, SL, even the PBR test viewers, still use OpenGL, so, no, no ray tracing in SL, even with PBR.

And while the 4070 will draw an image sent from the CPU a lot faster (40 series vs 16 series, 70 vs 50, etc.) since the NEW card is goingg in the OLD pc, it will actually spend most of it's time waiting on the same OLD CPU to calculate what it's drawing.

 

SL frames are built by the CPU and then thrown at the GPU with the message "stick that flat 2d cpu opengl render on the monitor". The RTX raytracing requires that the GPU turns the scene into a monitor image, not the CPU.

[Ted McGregor]

21 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

The RTX still needs a specific client rendering engine system, that passes it the info it needs to do the ray tracing, SL, even the PBR test viewers, still use OpenGL, so, no, no ray tracing in SL, even with PBR.

Partially true. Even though SL's engine does not support true ray tracing (that's why you see reflections and physical depth but not the actual beams of light ), the RTX hardware will certainly improve the PBR experience for lighting, reflections and depth.

I agree you shouldn't just invest in RTX hardware, because of SL only.

And jumping from the GTX to RTX will defenitely require upgrades to other vital PC components as well. I'd suggest a new PC as a whole while you are at it.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Ted McGregor

[Zalificent Corvinus]

2 minutes ago, Ted McGregor said:

Partially true. Even though SL's engine does not support true ray tracing, the RTX hardware will certainly improve the PBR experience for lighting, reflections and depth.

Maybe, post Vulkan, but you wont see much improvement in "quality" with opengl, as SL does almost everything CPU side. TPV devs have muttered bitterly about thiss for some time. Qnd improvements in "speed" would realistically need a new CPU.

 

People went through thiss when the 20x0 RTX cards came out, expecting it would magically improve their directx/pbr games dramatically, because "ooooh ray tracing", and then found that for all pre 20x0 RTX card games, the RTX made ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL, because their directx/pbr game's rendering engines didn't speak "RTX".

 

Sl's opengl/pbr engine probably doesn't speak "RTX" either, and the opengl/ALM engine certainly doesn't.

[Ted McGregor]

20 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

.. "speed" would realistically need a new CPU.

Yes. The GPU jump will require other vital PC components to be upgraded too. Otherwise you suffer indeed bottlenecks you described.

20 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

Sl's opengl/pbr engine probably doesn't speak "RTX" either, and the opengl/ALM engine certainly doesn't.

Sure. SL will not be able to use RTX hardware to project true beams of light from light sources and reflect them or other lighting effects. But again. The newer hardware will improve overall performance, included by assistance of the built-in tensa-cores, which have more functions (like processing PBR ) than mere raytracing capabilities only.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Ted McGregor

[BillFletcher]

5 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

WHAT is "ray tracing"?

(Asking for a friend. Because of course *I* know!)

Thanks so much for asking for me.

[AmeliaJ08]

Very unlikely to be offered in SL, at least for a while.

Real time ray tracing still blows my mind, not sure people appreciate just how much of a leap that is. It's not perfect and it's of course limited if you want to do it 60+ times per second but the fact we have silicon that can do such a complex calculation so many times per second and it actually works is very cool, it's genuinely 2023 in the world of graphics hardware.

This stuff used to take hours/days per frame!

 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

10 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

WHAT is "ray tracing"?

(Asking for a friend. Because of course *I* know!)

Popping in to give a visual example.

 

There's an interactive slider you can play with here - https://images.nvidia.com/geforce-com/international/comparisons/watch-dogs-legion-ray-tracing/watch-dogs-legion-ray-tracing-interactive-comparison-001-on-vs-off.html

I don't actually know how many games make good use of it currently. Used to just be a few back when I got my 3070. I'm sure the list has grown since then.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Ayashe Ninetails
Grammaring

[Luna Bliss]

2 hours ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Popping in to give a visual example.

oOo thank you for the picture worth a thousand words.  It's much more beautiful.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

12 minutes ago, Luna Bliss said:

oOo thank you for the picture worth a thousand words.  It's much more beautiful.

Yeah it is. Ray tracing paired with DLSS is the main reason why I went with an RTX over an AMD Radeon graphics card. I so rarely play AAA games, but the reflections and lighting looked so nice, I went with it just in case it made its way into the indie scene (and it has a bit - Raji and Loopmancer come to mind).

I can't see SL getting this any time soon. There are so many games that don't have it (yet?).

[Liaa Nova]

8 hours ago, Ted McGregor said:

Partially true. Even though SL's engine does not support true ray tracing (that's why you see reflections and physical depth but not the actual beams of light ), the RTX hardware will certainly improve the PBR experience for lighting, reflections and depth.

I agree you shouldn't just invest in RTX hardware, because of SL only.

And jumping from the GTX to RTX will defenitely require upgrades to other vital PC components as well. I'd suggest a new PC as a whole while you are at it.

Did you mean the specific cards listed, or from GTX to RTX in general? I just went from GTX 1060 to RTX 3060 with no problems, the computer had all that it needed to support it, so interested if there's anything I need to check (or if it was just for those specific cards)

[Ted McGregor]

16 minutes ago, Liaa Nova said:

Did you mean the specific cards listed, or from GTX to RTX in general?

Like Zalificent has explained before, if you merely have upgraded a GPU from GTX 1xxx to RTX 3xxx only, after let's say more than 3 years of buying the complete system, chance is high components like CPU or memory will become a bottleneck of processing graphical data. This will be noticeable with so-called micro-stutters, which can be very annoying for demanding games ( FPS, racing simulators ).

Personally, for the sake of safety, I certainly would check if your power supply supports peak currents for the newer card. With an RTX 3xxx series GPU, power supplies should at least be able to catch peaks of a few hundred watts. I chose one of 750 to be on the safe side of things. I would certainly go no lower as 600.

Edited September 6, 2023 by Ted McGregor

[Nalates Urriah]

When asking a question about SL it is always essential to understand whether "can" or "does" is the proper word.

CAN - Yes, someday.

DOES - No.

The Lab used to tell us about their near-term (1 yr) and long-term (5 yr) plans. It helps people decide how to upgrade their computers.

Tell as in they published the info on the SL Blog.

[Liaa Nova]

1 hour ago, Ted McGregor said:

Like Zalificent has explained before, if you merely have upgraded a GPU from GTX 1xxx to RTX 3xxx only, after let's say more than 3 years of buying the complete system, chance is high components like CPU or memory will become a bottleneck of processing graphical data. This will be noticeable with so-called micro-stutters, which can be very annoying for demanding games ( FPS, racing simulators ).

Personally, for the sake of safety, I certainly would check if your power supply supports peak currents for the newer card. With an RTX 3xxx series GPU, power supplies should at least be able to catch peaks of a few hundred watts. I chose one of 750 to be on the safe side of things. I would certainly go no lower as 600.

Thanks! The PSU is a 750 so hopefully all ok. Not noticing any issues but I don't play any games just chat in SL so that might be why!

[JeromFranzic]

1 hour ago, Liaa Nova said:

Did you mean the specific cards listed, or from GTX to RTX in general? I just went from GTX 1060 to RTX 3060 with no problems, the computer had all that it needed to support it, so interested if there's anything I need to check (or if it was just for those specific cards)

It depends. If you're mostly playing games and not doing too much multimedia creation, your system as is should be OK.

If you are looking to seriously develop anything, including creating programs and serious 3D modeling/AI/data crunching, Ted's final paragraph in that comment makes sense. Anything to speed up compilation is always preferable, of course that depends on what you're developing (and whatever hardware upgrades you can afford).

[Bree Giffen]

I know Cyberpunk 2077 had raytracing added recently. I tried to enable it on my computer which doesn't support it and the whole game crashed. I had to reinstall. I'd love to see it in SL but it's not necessary.