Raytraced Global Illumination. A game changer

Yeah, available when? When DX 12 is outdated?

This thing was released in August. I expected at least something modern and polished. And what did we get? A great bundle of unfinished stuff. Including the graphics that have to be tuned with every patch.

They may work on DX 12, but the result has yet to be seen.

The biggest bonus from DX12 will be DLSS. Because the graphics are already pretty good and will only get slightly better with Raytracing
 But DLSS is just ~40% more performance at better image clarity for free; at least for everyone with an RTX card.

And especially for the simmers really looking forward to VR (me included) DLSS will bring the needed performance to fly in VR even in High Settings for the mid-high tier of HMDs. It’s gonna be wild, once VR and DX12 are out :slight_smile:

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Ray tracing?? It is the most taxing thing you can imagine. Right now with RX On, most games lose anything between 30% to 50% of performance. Those games that lose less, have RX implemented only partially. DX12 might improve slightly the performance, but only on the higher core, more modern processors. The improvement is not expected to be by much anyway (Asobo said that themselves in one of the interviews).

Do you have anything constructive to say?

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The shader system that Asobo has implemented for FS2020 is borderline hard to distinguish from actual ray tracing, and even other developers of 3rd party addons for the sim have openly stated that they find it hard to believe that it’s not already being raytraced, that’s how good it is. Anyone who has spent more than 15 minutes in the sim can see this is true, so I really don’t see how actual ray traced GI, no matter how efficient, is going to make any noticeable visual impact when you consider the scale of the environment.

Ray traced GI is much better suited to smaller scale environments like shooters because you can immediately see right in front of you how it affects surfaces in close proximity, like walls, floors, vehicles, furniture, trees, glass, etc. In a flight simulator, those close surfaces aren’t really experienced in the same way because of the massive scale and how far away you normally are. (Surfaces in the cockpit would be the exception, of course.) But again, the shaders that are already present are very impressive, and after 300+ hours in the sim I’m still amazed by the little details, like how the orange displays on the 152’s radio panel casts a soft orange light on the back of the yoke and other nearby surfaces. Sure, that’s just direct lighting and not global illumination, but the illusion is pretty slick.

I suppose, if you’re close to an airport, like at a gate for example, you could see small global illumination effects, like a red fire truck sitting in bright sunlight next to a building might cast off a bit of a red shading onto the building. But again, those kinds of things are so subtle and uncommon, you likely won’t really notice.

If I were going to rally for any ray tracing (assuming it could be done without impacting frame rate
 lol) it would be for the reflections
 water, glass, instruments, fuselages, etc., but the existing shaders are still doing a pretty good job of faking that too.

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Raytraced reflections would make a big improvement. Right now Screen Space Reflections limitations are very obvious. You move the camera and the reflections disappear (eg. cockpit reflections on windows), objects in front of water make water reflections disappear around it (e.g bridge cables) etc.

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I never noticed them disappear before. I will need to test that. I can see that the reflections are dynamic, in that as my PFD updates, the reflection also updates.

So if I were to use the shift keys to move my viewpoint around, the reflections will disappear?

Also this video displays the difference very well

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So you missed the Q&A from a few weeks back when the devs clearly talked about DX12 and that they were already working on implementing it?!