Steam's Hardware Survey Shows Not Much For Linux

[Kivada]

SLI and overclocking are becoming increasingly pointless unless you do stuff like bitcoin mining or other high performance computing. For gaming it's more of an overkill.

Try going multi screen or to 3840x2160. Imagine having a 5 screen wrap around setup at a total resolution of 10800x3840 or 41.5MP.

[Kivada]

Except it already works in Unreal Engine 4, on current hardware.

Last I checked UT4 Ray Tracing version was still unplayable even at 800x600. Now this was a few years ago, but seeing as there is no rush to ray tracing in the gaming industry even though processing power has increased significantly says that the hardware still is nowhere near there yet.

Remember, ray tracing would allow for vastly improved physics, fully destructible environments, real damage calculation instead of percentages and head shots. Wouldn't it be fun to play an MMORPG where you can cripple your enemies with a strike to the leg or be able to cleave off an arm without killing them?

[shmerl]

Try going multi screen or to 3840x2160. Imagine having a 5 screen wrap around setup at a total resolution of 10800x3840 or 41.5MP.

It's a rather rarely used scenario for gaming I'd guess to really worry about it as the main concern.

[dee.]

Last I checked UT4 Ray Tracing version was still unplayable even at 800x600. Now this was a few years ago, but seeing as there is no rush to ray tracing in the gaming industry even though processing power has increased significantly says that the hardware still is nowhere near there yet.

Remember, ray tracing would allow for vastly improved physics, fully destructible environments, real damage calculation instead of percentages and head shots. Wouldn't it be fun to play an MMORPG where you can cripple your enemies with a strike to the leg or be able to cleave off an arm without killing them?

But so would a fully voxel-based 3d-environment. Minecraft is already an example of fully destructible environment implemented in voxels, kind of... now imagine that but with way more detail, way higher resolution, with an environment consisting of scalable voxel objects... sparse octrees can reduce the required memory and rendering time considerably. The downside is, that current hardware and API's are designed with polygons in mind, which is why most implementations of real voxel graphics still look really blocky these days.

[AJenbo]

Remember, ray tracing would allow for vastly improved physics, fully destructible environments, real damage calculation instead of percentages and head shots. Wouldn't it be fun to play an MMORPG where you can cripple your enemies with a strike to the leg or be able to cleave off an arm without killing them?

That has absolutely nothing to do with ray trace rendering.

[Kivada]

That has absolutely nothing to do with ray trace rendering.

Really? The articles I read on it made it sound like ray tracing would open up real world physics as you would no longer be limited by wire frames and hit boxes and all models would have layers like flesh and bone.

Maybe it's just my want for a super realistic game bleeding through.

[Gps4l]

Ray tracing is only about the light in a scene.

Until now ? Its too much calculation for use in games.
It is already used for static renders.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs4300old/s11/L21/Raytracing_reflection.png

My guess would be, that you need solids, if you want a fully destructible object.
But those are to heavy for gaming too.

I cad programs you can see the difference between solids and lets call them boxes. ( wire frame models with surfaces)

When you cut a solid in half, its like when you saw through a wooden beam.
The second one is like you saw through a paper box.

The second one is used in games.
Thats why if you get outside a map in a game, you do not see most of the surfaces.
You can only see them from one side, if you look from the other side you see nothing.

I made some maps for a game, and you could use solids, but as soon as you made the map ready for the game, all solids were converted into surfaces.

[AJenbo]

Really? The articles I read on it made it sound like ray tracing would open up real world physics as you would no longer be limited by wire frames and hit boxes and all models would have layers like flesh and bone.

Maybe it's just my want for a super realistic game bleeding through.

Physics and rendering would still be two separate systems. The only true part is that a system capable of ray trace rendering would probably also be faster at physics simulation, but one does not dictate the other. In fact you could have you realistic physic with a normal scan line raster. The reason MMORPG have very simple physics is mostly due to network constraints. There are already plenty of games capable of amputation and hit based crippling.

Having flesh and bones simulation is also something that very much depends on what area of the game engine you are applying it to. For realistic body movement (skin building and stretching) ray tracing doesn't enter in to it, you do the model deformation and then render it afterward with what ever technique you prefer, you would most likely still be using a wire-frame mesh for the skin, but the rigging would be different, instead of having the bones tug on the wire frame you have the mussels animate on top of the bones and then that pushes on the wire frame.

If you want a completely destructible world with internals, you need voxels, again this doesn't dictate what render you use. Animating voxel models is still in the early phase of development and current hardware isn't optimized for handling it on a large scale. With voxels you could also more accurately simulate physics in certain areas.

Both voxel and polygon rendering have there strengths and drawbacks (unless you take voxels to the atomic level). Blends of voxels and polygon meshes are also possible where destruction happens on a voxel level but is then transfered to the polygon model for visual representation.

So forget ray trace, what you want is voxels and better physics simulation. Ray trace is just for more realistic light and reflections.

[dee.]

So forget ray trace, what you want is voxels and better physics simulation. Ray trace is just for more realistic light and reflections.

But just think how pretty it would be if we had sparse voxel octrees with raytrace lighting in realtime...

[GreatEmerald]

Last I checked UT4 Ray Tracing version was still unplayable even at 800x600. Now this was a few years ago, but seeing as there is no rush to ray tracing in the gaming industry even though processing power has increased significantly says that the hardware still is nowhere near there yet.

Nope, you're living on outdated information. It's very playable in real-time on a GTX 680, as shown in the latest GDC. I assume the resolution was full HD.

The reason MMORPG have very simple physics is mostly due to network constraints.

Not really. Eye-candy physics, like ragdolls or physics-affected particles, is completely client-side.