V12 wrote in Fri Dec 10, 2021 8:45 am:Why not ? P3D is on older technology than MSFS2020, but can do this :
Yep. MS-FS is only DX11 - an openworld engine a game studio created for a driving sim, plugged into FS-X. Real-time reflections have been done in non-flight games for a long time, and flight games - it involves rendering the entire scene again (maybe with multiple renders to cover areas out of view but reflected in several surfaces), so it's normally very slow - and doesn't cover cloud shadows or tree shadows. It's sort of like how doing shadows using one technique for everything the Rembrandt way (standard game way) is very slow.
The compositor/ALS does the shadows, but much faster, and using multiple techniques. IIRC Icecold had trouble even getting the compositor object shadows to render fast initially, as shadows just eat up performance.
The plan with the new tech Icecold is working on is to do everything very fast and in a single pass. This will be used to create realtime environment maps - which can be used for environment reflection on plane surfaces, and even in water.
Flightgear already does real-time environment maps in the new pipeline - but fast, much like how it does shadows fast. The colours reflecting off the plane in this SOTM screenshot [1] are real-time
TheEagle wrote in Sun Nov 14, 2021 10:12 pm:Yeah … either a better terrain engine, or a 5000 MB/s superfast SSD
Yeah bandwidth is also a factor - more internet bandwidth, rather than hard-drive i/o - MSFS reached the max stated bandwidth of 5 MB/s at slow subsonic speeds at release e.g. [link] as the approach is bandwidth heavy. With less bandwidth the scenery quality drops.
StuartB said the WS3 terrain can keep up at hypersonic speeds. WS30 has a LoD system, which can render all the way up into space.
merspieler wrote in Fri Dec 10, 2021 1:38 pm:Tho for ray tracing to become really popular, we need to see a few more GPU generations with it... not only from NVidia but also AMD and Intel...
Because of performance impact and pricing of performant cards (even at MSRP)
Yep - in some ways RTX has become the new 4k. 4k was a convenient marketing feature for GPU manufacturers, and also monitor makers who can just divide the LCD screen into more pixels. 4k mostly dumps 3d performance into a blackhole (mostly), with more of the same plain boring pixels. 4k is more useful for 2d though. Games meanwhile are mostly driven by console performance which lagged behind PC last generation. So there was lots of GPU performance available but no game features to sell new PC GPUs. 4k was convenient. RTX is similar - it's possible to add raytracing to simple graphics. RTX does make lighting look softer, but it doesn't fix other things. Once RTX marketing started, GPU manufacturers forgot 4k existed and the talk was back to 1080p as if nothing happened - unfortunate for 2/3k screen users who can't just run at half resolution to get 1080p, as they get blur.
RTX is another of those one-technique-fits all games industry things right now - it's more useful for games where there's lots of lights/explosions everywhere, and scenery geometry that's changing a lot. Probably helps to make the floor a bit wet and avoid non-RTX lighting techniques, so switching it on is noticeable. If one technique is used for everything, it can eat performance so you lose visuals elsewhere. For flight sims and other applications that have static geometry and fixed lights that don't change much, lightmaps are better than real-time raytracing could hope to be. For openworld applications that have the sun/moon as light sources there are other techniques including real-time environment maps, spherical harmonics/light probes etc. There will probably be some interesting techniques in future using the computational power of the special cores that do raytracing.
Kind regards