I have no evidence of this, but I noticed a few things which may suggest that Ray Tracing is finally in this versions.
The lighting on the rocks seems to reflect the surrounding enviroment more than I’ve seen before
The scene where the helicopter is heading towards the boat I noticed both the helicopter and ship now reflect correctly into the ocean even when the waves are diffracted, I’m not sure I’ve seen this in the base game.
The cockpit looks lighter which may suggest there is more bounces of light
The scene where the ambulance is heading towards the airliner, the ground is wet and the reflections seem to be showing reflections perfectly.
In the visor of the crop duster it seems to be a perfect reflection of what’s in-front though I guess it could be a complex cubemap.
Staff walking under the beluga are reflecting from the fuselage and I can see the light bouncing from the ground very slightly
My suspicion is why the lighting looks better is because the footage was recorded with Ray Tracing on!
All else being equal Nvidia sells more cards if RT is in MSFS. Total no-brainer that this is eventually going to happen, very plausible that getting there might need the sort of engine overhaul that would change system requirements and necessitate a new product.
Assuming MS go out of their depth and promise that 2024 will have RT (if not on day one, then on some day). How many would go and buy an RT capable GPU today?
We’ll just have to wait and see before we commit to anything.
If anything tanks performance then it is Raytracing. Don’t get any romantic notion that they have solved this problem.
As a piece of marketing having RT would be seen (by the marketers at least) as a plus but never forget that the massive bulk of the complaints about this sim as it has been since release (and to be frank, every other sim both past and present) has been about performance. RT will compound that.
Frame gen would be the only way this would be somewhat viable but so few people have 40 series cards. Also, DX12/Raytracing/DLSS 3 are all VRAM heavy. I have a 4070ti and even at only 2k my 12 gigs sometimes gets maxed out even without RT.
Am I against it? No. I usually have RT turned on in other games but by god it makes those games
a lot more unstable and swallows a HUGE amount of your frames. Of course if you get 150 frames in a non raytraced game and turning on RT knocks you down to 70 or 80 then that is still very playable. If you are a simmer who is getting 30 to 40 frames, say. What do you think you will get when you turn RT on?
We probably need double frame insertion (which I think will happen down the line)
Nope. That is indeed the same SSR based reflections we have now. Looks to be an identical water material & shader from 2020. Once an object is off screen out of the rendered view port, it cant be taken into account for reflections. This is not raytraced. Also reflections on visiors seem to be a higher res probe based cubemap which can currently be accomplished by increasing the default sample rate in your user.cfg.
Thanks, @Vibstronium. First time of my life the illustration is that clear.
Thanks OP and everyone for this thread. That’s not a “love spreading thread”, just a peaceful exchange about technical things. It’s refreshing and I felt “likes on post” were not representing the feelings I had reading you.
Sorry for the disturbance, ignore me and go on, please, go on …
I hope raytracing will be implemented in the cockpit shadow casting and cockpit illumination. The illumination of the cabin and cockpit was always a kinda weak spot in FS2020, but raytracing can solve this problem
Why does anyone think this is going to be a different engine from MSFS 2020?
From what I’ve seen, all this is is MSFS 2020 optimized for Missions and Activities and some new DLC.
I hope they’ve hired enough people to fix all the issues associated with those modules to this point.
I hope they’ll be far along in the SDK Documentation when it’s released.
If 2024 is to have Ray Tracing (which, as noted above, I highly doubt, but could be very wrong), then so will 2020.
Again, Microsoft is just creating buzz (hence why they decided to attend Flight Sim Expo, to promote this, and advertised this a week ahead of time so it’s not a total shock when they announce it), and funding further development by calling it a “new” game. I don’t have an issue with that, all the power to them, I love they’re putting this much effort into the product(s) and am willing to give them more money to do that.
And this is exactly what I was hoping 2020 would eventually become. So I’m psyched.
People are ever hopeful that marketing is true and this means something other than “minor updates to the existing engine already in use, like we’ve been making for the last few years”
My bet is the evolution is in the modeling of the humans and their movements and interactions with them, and hopefully in the scenery SDK for modeling locations as well as available library items to use. Not in the base graphics engine.
Edit: Oh, and in the mission definition and stuff associated with that.
And there will have to be an evolution in “click spots” in exterior mode as well as interior mode.
And in the cameras. Hopefully the cameras work is ported to both 2020 and 2024.
Clearly they have some ability to do better “fire” particle effects and perturb tree models in the wind (which things that don’t exist in the previous engine) and those have a graphical element, but I wouldn’t expect random things to improve that aren’t specifically driven by the “mission” activities.
The ability to do this stuff was there, it was in FSX, but I don’t know if there was a way to program it in 2020, so, I agree this will definitely be improved for 2024.
