DreamWorks' OpenMoonRay Renderer Code Published

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DreamWorks' OpenMoonRay Renderer Code Published

Last summer DreamWorks announced plans to open-source MoonRay, their production renderer used for films like The Bad Guys, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and other animated films. Today they have delivered on that exciting milestone with publishing the open-source code...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenMoonRay-Published

[Quackdoc]

Dont know anyone to test this, but glad its happening cant wait to see the YT videos about it

[Barnacle]

Nice, looking forward to trying this.

[pegasus]

One wonders ... if they're releasing this, what else do they now have in house?

[bug77]

This is probably one of the better answers to those still claiming RT is a gimmick.
Interestingly, it has dependencies on Optix (and CUDA), but the main articles doesn't mentions these trivialities.

[MaxToTheMax]

Very cool! Thanks Dreamworks!

[Pepec9124]

This is probably one of the better answers to those still claiming RT is a gimmick.
Interestingly, it has dependencies on Optix (and CUDA), but the main articles doesn't mentions these trivialities.

Sure, I'll take the bait.
RT is a gimmick when it comes to gaming. In current iteration it's a performance hog with no real benefits^*.
It was always useful in Pro uses like filmmaking, because you don't need to be able to render 144 fps when making a movie and you can spread the load between many hosts, as demonstrated by DreamWorks.


^*I'm not into "realistic" graphics in games anymore. It's just bulging up dev resources, making games extremely expensive to make, gameplay should always take priority in my opinion.

[Linuxxx]

Sure, I'll take the bait.
RT is a gimmick when it comes to gaming. In current iteration it's a performance hog with no real benefits^*.
It was always useful in Pro uses like filmmaking, because you don't need to be able to render 144 fps when making a movie and you can spread the load between many hosts, as demonstrated by DreamWorks.


^*I'm not into "realistic" graphics in games anymore. It's just bulging up dev resources, making games extremely expensive to make, gameplay should always take priority in my opinion.

If you really care about gameplay, then you should be happy to hear that it's now possible to enjoy the original Half-Life (1998) in full path-tracing glory with a Vulkan renderer!

I know I did on my nVidia RTX 3060 Ti via WINE-Staging:

https://github.com/sultim-t/xash-rt/releases

Also, here's the excellent analysis video done by Digital Foundry:

[JosiahBradley]

This is probably one of the better answers to those still claiming RT is a gimmick.
Interestingly, it has dependencies on Optix (and CUDA), but the main articles doesn't mentions these trivialities.

There have been RT engines since day 1. Pixar has their own and it's in my original IBM graphics manual. What you're confused by might be marketing for the new types of "Realtime Ray Tracing, which this is not" this is your standard distributed CPU farm engine for RT.

Amazing it's open now but don't drum up stupid comparison to marketing.

[bug77]

There have been RT engines since day 1. Pixar has their own and it's in my original IBM graphics manual. What you're confused by might be marketing for the new types of "Realtime Ray Tracing, which this is not" this is your standard distributed CPU farm engine for RT.

Amazing it's open now but don't drum up stupid comparison to marketing.

I'm not confused at all. I was just pointing out, entertainment that amazes us has been employing RT for decades. Of course, not real-time kind, but you can't pretend it would not be a net gain to put that into games as well. Someday, because what we have now is akin to hybrid cars when what we really want are EVs.