PC If Minecraft Can Have Ray Tracing So Can Tsw

cmon

 

It probably could, but I'm not sure whether we really want it or not.
Raytracing takes a really big hit on performance, and we have barely enough of it the way it is right now.
Also, Raytracing needs RTX graphics cards, and at least according to the steam hardware survey, RTX cards aren't that common, still in the single digit percents.
Also also, I'd rather have the team at DTG spend their time on things that improve way more relevant aspects of the game than add Raytracing (example: bug fixes, more performance improvisations, bringing the weight back to full/empty wagons, finally completely fixing this sound bug, or simply bring more features to the locos themselves)

 

Minecraft mobile revenue
I'm sure once DTG starts generating tens of millions of pounds in revenue they'll consider your suggestion seriously. Even more so if they believe a significant majoity of their customers possess graphic cards that support ray tracing.

 

No point having ray tracing without DLSS or similar.

The game already bends most pcs in half with everything cranked up for whatever witchcraft goes on behind the scenes. I'd personally prefer it as it is until it can give everyone a stable frame rate all the time.

As above If most people don't have the hardware for it it's pointless. There's barely any rat tracing games out either in the volume of roles released

 

Just cuz another game has ray tracing doesn't mean every game needs ray tracing. there are games out there that look great without. Also ray tracing is not just you click a button and it magically works. Matt tried already and it was just a dark black mess cuz everything would need to be updated. That means the lighting, assets, environment, everything. Also ray tracing costs a lot of performance so unless they implement dlss and other options, it's useless. The amount of work that goes into it would be too much work. They would have to update every single dlc one by one which would take years or decades to do

 

Lol just look how the game works under UE4 and you don't want any other features.
The only one could be DLSS and DX12 and that would be at least nice to have

 

Given the current performance of the game, RT would give single digit FPS. It hammers the CPU HARD.

 

Even then, it doesn't help if you're CPU limited, since that's the major bottleneck for raytracing. DLSS and FSR help mostly if you're GPU limited. CPU limits are why for example, Gotham Knights (In this case due to being atrociously engineered) cannot hit 60fps consistently even on an RTX 4090.

 

I love the way that this thread is suddenly revived after more than 3 years and one pandemic and it springs to life as if not time at all has passed

 

they aren't a dev

 

These threads are getting out of hand. TSW being compared to everything, with the catchy phrase "If they can, so can DTG", completely forgetting about the compared games developer, resources, or other games main focus.

 

For real? I'm surprised its that low still. Thought most people would have made the jump at least to RTX 20XX series cards by now if not 30XX cards with the big price slump post-crypto madness.

 

Tbf it seems to have got out of hand a few years ago considering the thread's age

 

I don't see why an RTX option would be a bad thing. Don't use it if you don't want to- might be nice to pop on just for screenshots even.

 

Ray tracing is not what tsw needs right this moment. Soo many other things to improve or fix. And besides, I don't think ray tracing would really add much to a simulation game. Just good graphics is enough. There are many non ray traced games out there that look amazing.

 

Whoops. You're right ! My bad. I didn't look at the age of the thread.

 

Tsw4 feature list there

 

I hope decent night lighting is on your list too. ​

 

Politely disagree; ray tracing is a game-changer in most titles. If you cannot see the difference, I am slightly bewildered...

But need better antialiasing and DLSS support, among other performance improvements, before even thinking about ray tracing.

 

I like Ray Tracing. Smashing fella, his presence lights up any special occasion. I’ll get my coat.

 

Who is Ray and what wonderful picture is he tracing?

 

How ray tracing will change a game really depends on how it's implemented and what is implemented. I think metro exodus enhanced edition is the best example of ray tracing out there. Some games out there like cod mw 2019 have ray traced shadows which honestly doesn't make a difference. Can't even tell based on YouTube videos. Cyberpunk also seems not to have much going on even with rt enabled. Only difference I really see are shiny and reflective cars and puddles. Can't even run watch dogs legion on ray tracing and that's only shiny windows.

So if tsw were to have rt shadows or ssao, I wouldn't be able to tell or didn't be focused on it. Reflections would only really be useful in rainy situations or water. Or make trains and windows more reflective which again I wouldn't really pay attention to or be wowd by every time.

Rtgi might be useful for realistic lighting and light bounces such as that seen in metro exodus.

All of these are performance taxing so dlss, fsr and xess i believe for intel gpus would have to come first

 

They need to sort the anti-aliasing out before adding any of this fancy stuff. Still far too much flickering going on for my liking.

 

Strongly support this, I've been running on DX12 consistently using the steam launch command and it can add a full 30fps, it would be good to have it officially. DLSS would be great too as the anti-aliasing (particularly on OHLE) is a real weak spot at the moment IMO that can only really be improved by brute forcing to 150% screen percentage at the moment, if you have the hardware for it.

 

Any time I play a TSW3 route and look at the massively blown-out daytime lighting that makes everything look like it's all a different shade of bright grey, and the resulting flat looking surfaces, I can imagine what DTG were going for but didn't quite manage to pull off this time around.
And that's precisely the look that games I play with a decent hardware or software RTGI system have.
Look at stuff like Metro Exodus, it manages to pull off natural looking interior lighting which is noticeably brighter, softer, and more diffuse than the raster version of the game, that otherwise had a lot of unnatural shadow edges and larger dark areas right next to brightly lit ones, no smooth transition between them. The RT update radically changed that and enhanced the natural looking contrast between light and dark while ensuring that the spread of light in interiors was more realistic.
Unfortunately with TSW3 we have something where there's an effort to get that kind of lighting using a non-raytraced solution, but without something like ambient occlusion that's necessary to provide a decent contrast with it that provides definition to surfaces. As a result there's a lot of unnaturally brightly lit interiors and areas that should have well defined areas of shadow but don't, like the underside of bridges or inside the bogies of trains.

Now, obviously implementing any RT implementation has a cost to performance, though several games have managed it and still pull off 60fps modes on lower end hardware, on Series S this generally requires heavy use of upscaling and basically mandates software RT though, which is likewise basically what you will be looking at on any lower spec graphics card that's nominally capable of RT. And if you want to keep the game being accessible to more users without hardware that can support it you need to maintain a raster lighting system alongside it (though once the RT lighting system is in there it's a lot less work for developers to add to future expansions than it is for them to add the current lighting).
As it stands, TSW3 would probably benefit in its current state from a solid AO implementation to provide much needed contrast and definition to scenes, which would cost a lot less in terms of hardware usage. Brightness and contrast sliders would not go amiss too, to let users bring it in line with most other games without needing a monitor profile set just for TSW that sets the two to opposite extremes.
Long-term, RT is probably something that'd give a whole new lease of life to TSW. Perhaps in a future numbered iteration once DTG are more comfortable with UE5 features a couple of years down the line.

 

I for one would love to see if the Series S could pull off a decent 1440p 60hz mode with FSR2 enabled.

It's definitely the kind of thing that's a more attainable short/mid-term goal.

 

Generally the success of ray tracing depends on how well it's implemented, but generally it helps light up areas that would get dark using traditional lighting methods. Ray-traced games generally look a lot more vibrant and realistic than those that aren't. Some games don't need it - Gran Turismo has never had it in a full capacity but GT Sport and GT7 still look amazing. Gran Turismo 5 and 6 do look a bit dark sometimes but for PS3 games still look amazing, a considerable feat considering they were 1080p45 games in a 720p30 generation.

The work to get ray tracing in TSW is likely not worth it, but TSW lighting as it stands now can look very washed out or unrealistically dark - a full implementation of it could look amazing, but DTG would need to make a tech demo for it to prove it would be worth doing, like how CSX Heavy Haul, GWE and Riesa to Dresden were tech demos for the sort of routes DTG could make but decided not to make.

 

Minecraft has low quality textures so ray tracing isn't gonna swallow up fps that much. An example recently with cp2077 running on a rtx 4090. No dlss, rt off 160fps, rt on 40fps. Take away 120fps from tsw and your left with a still image!

 

Not just to performance, but to sales. You've just knocked out the 80% of PC owners who don't have an RTX card, and all last-gen console owners. Ray-tracing is probably the current "Let them eat cake" of the Gaming PC Master Race

Nor is it necessary- This does not use it, because 8th-gen consoles can't: Miss it? At all?

 

But then you would have an option to have it on or off. Ray tracing is just a feature you can turn on and off even if you had a next gen console or a rtx gpu

 

Ray tracing isn't decided by the developers, you can turn it on and off as you wish. However as there are so many assets to convert so it actually works DTG will never do it. Portal with RTX only exists as a tech demo, and is a far easier game with most of the game reusing the same textures over and over again. If DTG had the time to do it they could easily do it, but not realistically in the position they are now.

 

Why have devs spend time on something that's going to destroy performance on 99% of the playbase's machines, to cater to the 1% that can even notice a difference...
But it's worth revisiting when it's not impacting performance so much.

 

Not sure if this is worth investigating: https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce/rtx-remix/

If you have the time and know-how, i think you can mod it into the game.

 

Pc only and unless you have a rtx gpu, pretty useless. Better to create a new game with official rtx features than to use a mod

 

Same arguments can be used for DLSS and people still want it.

 

As I said in the very next lines of the same paragraph:

"And if you want to keep the game being accessible to more users without hardware that can support it you need to maintain a raster lighting system alongside it (though once the RT lighting system is in there it's a lot less work for developers to add to future expansions than it is for them to add the current lighting)."

 

That's if people have the hardware of course.

 

Have to agree with this. I've yet to see any game where I'm blown away by ray tracing, it mostly looks marginally better at best. To be fair, I haven't specifically gone out to look for ray tracing games, but that is my experience based on the ones I have played.

 

I mean, if someone is thinking about ray tracing and trying to do it on a non-RTX card, they'd have to be pretty silly.

Again, i think this is pretty obvious but if a dev isn't going to put it in then you may as well try to do it yourself.

 

My 2 cents but to the nay-sayers in this thread, you do realise that just because a dev adds in ray tracing support doesn't mean that you automagically need to have an RTX card. A lot of games will let you toggle it on or off anyways, so whats the big deal? Obviously people want efforts focused elsewhere and thats a valid argument. However, just because you don't plan on using it shouldn't mean it not be implemented. I feel like whenever people talk about new feature suggestions, people seem to take it a bit personally as if its stepping on their ability to play the game. Whilst yes, I get it that its a pain to have to upgrade your system to take advantage of new features, we can't stay in the past forever. Tech is getting cheaper and its not like these games are changing over night and its to be expected that for a while older systems will be able to keep up to some degree. Basically i dont think its fair to hold back progress due to naysayers.

 

If ray tracing were to come, then dlss and its equivalent on other gpus need to come first. Cuz your performance would be impacted heavily with ray tracing.

 

It really depends what RT features a developer includes, how noticeable it is.

RT Reflections are a common one for "showing off", and are popular on things like car bodies in racing sims. They are definitely nice in large open world titles where they really show a difference as compared to the immersion-breaking of Screenspace reflections, where as soon as the thing being reflected is no longer on the screen, its reflection in the reflective surface vanishes too. These reflections can be truly impressive if multiple bounces are used but that HAMMERS hardware, as it allows you to see reflections of reflections within reflections, so you can be looking at a mirror, and seeing a reflection of your character but also a reflection of the mirror on the wall behind your character which is reflecting the back of your character's head. The downside of course being that they are a bit limited by the surfaces available, and so are mostly something you would want to implement in a city environment with lots of glass and rain.

RT Shadows are another popular one, games like GTAV make use of them. They are a handy way of smoothing shadows to make them look more natural and they can work wonders to deal with heavily aliased shadows from very narrow objects like chain fences. They are one of those things that are ubiquitous, but it's easy not to notice as a result, as the improvement ironically makes them stand out less due to looking more natural.

RTGI is the really noticeable improvement I have seen in games. This really transforms lighting. It takes into account what surfaces lighting has already reflected off when it falls on a surface, and as a result has it pick up the colour of that surface and transfer it onto where it ends up. Cyberpunk uses this really well and toggling between RT and baked Raster lighting shows a major difference. It makes interiors look way smoother and softer, and importantly more realistically saturated, as the interior colours are reflected between surfaces. In conjunction with RTAO this makes for far more realistic contrast between indirect light on surfaces and shadowing in corners as well, without the need for SSAO.

 

Thanks for your detailed explanations; really helps people like me who don't keep up as much with the more technical elements of gaming. I guess I've seen more of the 'gimmicky' implementations then. As with many things, I suppose ray tracing is where the industry is inevitably heading once hardware catches up to the demands. I'm not saying that I don't want it in TSW, but there are other things I'd assign a higher priority to.

 

At first I thought that's a mistake, googled it, and, indeed, they updated the game with RT shadows, and soon reflections. Amazing !

Also, thank you for the explaination. Given the details and examples you describe, it even sounds even more reasonable to implement it into TSW.

 

lol i have an 3080 rtx card and first thing i do is disabling it after having tried it for a little bit just to see how it looks

 

I mean, yeah, a lot of it also comes down to other factors.
How important is high FPS to you?
How high of a resolution are you playing at?
Are you willing to lower other settings to offset the hit from it?
I know people who'll knock games to medium presets and play at 1080p to get RT features and maintain framerates consistently above 60

Personally I will turn RT off if I cannot get 60 at 1440p, but some games can accomplish it just fine. Others, not a chance.

 

My guess is we should not expect to see it until TSW moves to UE5, but by then odds are RTX 30xx series cards will be the more common lower end spec ones available, comparable to the 5/6 year old ones currently making up a sizeable proportion of the steam charts. But it is probably an inevitability at some point. Funnily enough, something along the lines of DTG's Catan game may actually be somewhere we'd be more likely to see it first, with devs testing out the features in a far less demanding and much simpler title they can use to get used to it, before then bringing that experience back to a flagship product like TSW.

 

Cp2077 does look really nice with rt switched on. It's just the compromise of lowering the graphics quality or using dlss to achieve good frame rates. I mean it looks good on ultra settings with rt off.

With tsw if you catch the glass on the trains at the right angle, the reflections look pretty decent. Maybe some aspect of rt is used to make reflections look that good?

 

If the producer literally says he's not a fan of it, and the majority of this thread agrees, I doubt we'll ever see it anyway. But, one can dream. It's not even the reflections I am after, since they are quite good for what they are doing already, it's the shadows and lightning. Just imagine how stunning the cabs might look like with bounce light and shadows down the tiniest knob and lever.