I can imagine areas like some mirrors not showing exactly whats being reflected currently or off windows, would be interesting to see implemented, overwatch is already beautiful game, it’s amazing in the highest settings, though we don’t have benchmarks to see how much it actually improves performance or effect performance for couple months.
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my issue is the highest video setting is called “Epic” and yet really doesn’t look THAT much different than “low”. Other than a bit of AA here n there.
I think the 20 series nvidia GPU’s could really enhance the visual experience of OW and really drive even higher graphical fidelity.
…But I don’t think theres any chance.
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With the most recent results, it has a better performance than 1080, 20% higher, for COD it was 90fps for 4k Others normally around 70. While we barely have 4k 144hz monitors affordable as it’s around $2,000+, we won’t have full details of impact of the hardware for legacy games until much later.
I would like to see potential videos, of how it looks or would look from devs perspective with Ray Tracing enabled on OW, if the devs are interested in implementing and getting community feedback with details how it would affect performance with and without it on, i know some maps like Rialto will benefit greatly from it with its reflection on windows and shadows.
We are in early stages of next gen, on one hand, you need the hardware being available for the consumers, before software and dev time will normally start to be implemented for majority of legacy games.
Imagining how these animated shorts would look as the in-game.
I’d say it would probably take 1-2 years before the price drops and more people have access.
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Very few will have a 2080. Even fewer will play overwatch. Even fewer still will obsess over ray tracing.
Not happening any time soon, unless blizz uses overwatch as a “demo” engine.
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Raytracing doesn’t really provide any benefits for the style that Overwatch goes for. It’d basically only be useful for lights and shadows.
The real power of raytracing comes from asset creation. You use raytraced lights to create realistic shadows and lighting, and then bake it into the texture maps to be imported into Overwatch.
None of which would be felt by the end-user with an RTX card.
But since Overwatch has a hyper-stylized non-PBR aesthetic, most of that wouldn’t be necessary. Most of the “shadow” textures in Overwatch are handpainted anyway… and the reflections are all approximations with cubemaps, and the reflections aren’t even done in real-time. Converting to that system wouldn’t benefit anyone…
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Overwatch doesn’t have the art style to really match or warrant that kind of precision. And if you’re talking about reflections specifically, it would have a direct gameplay impact/advantage in much the same way as if characters only had shadows on the highest graphics settings.
Or RTX DLSS AI-Powered Anti-Aliasing?
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This
Right now, “ray tracing” comes across as little more than a buzzword invented by Big GPU to generate hype
If we were to ever get map editing functions then we would need to change the way they do lighting in this game.
Not really?
You’re buying into this idea of raytracing when you don’t even know what it does. Overwatch uses raster graphics that approximates raytraced images, that uses minimal raytracing for the creation of assets and barely uses (if any) raytracing at runtime.
Everything is handpainted, handcrafted, handplaced. There’s a bunch of old tricks that simulate hard shadows and stylized lighting.
Unless you want to create maps that specifically have realtime reflections and shadows (which are needlessly expensive and will wreck everyone’s framerate), the lighting generated in the game is a simple directional light, a skybox with a custom HDRI, and a tonemap postprocessing filter applied at runtime. The reflections are simple cubemap captures that update infrequently. There are only two or three places in all of the maps that use real-time shadows to have any meaningful effect (and they don’t use penumbras, making it unrealistic).
I’ll say this very clearly – Overwatch does not need raytracing. Of all the games to suggest raytracing, Overwatch ranks at the bottom. Right alongside other “cartoony” aesthetic games. It doesn’t adopt a physically-based rendering system so stringently like other realistic games do – it discards photorealism for an intentional art direction.
None of the older, existing systems that Overwatch uses are particularly expensive on system resources, and by adopting raytracing you’re making them especially expensive, for both system resources and your wallet. Basically forcing you to either brute force it with a high core/clock CPU, or buy into the RTX ecosystem at a premium.
Moving to a raytraced system also means you’re concurrently developing two separate render systems – the old raster system, and the new raytrace system, and have to ensure parity across both systems which lengthens the amount of time needed to create, polish, and produce assets for the game. All for an image quality lateral shift (that isn’t much better, and may be worse in some cases), and a framerate drop.
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The current gen is an easy skip.
The fact that those consumer cards can ray trace in real time is amazing, but right now hardly a thing. Only a handful of games are going to use ray tracing, and tomb raider + Battlefield 5 ran at full hd below 60fps (40fps~ range) - sure, it might be driver / game optimization, but at 1080p below 60fps? A 1200$ card? C’mon bruh.
Also, either you go 1440p@144hz or 4k@100hz, both having the same problems -> high temperature. A 1200$ card on airflow, using gpu boost, having everthing cranked up, being 80°C+ for hours is brainless. You want to watercool it, so smack another 200$ on top of it or get an aftermarket cooler and lower the settings.
Benchmarks will show whether it’s spicy or meh at the end. However as of right now it doesn’t offer too much for the price.
- Hardly any games that use it - will take time for other developer to implement it in future games.
- Prices too high, msrp is simply false.
- Next gen will make way better use of ray tracing, right now it feels like a beta/ early shoes.
- Rather a thing for animation studios than gamers.
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nvidia is using “raytracing” to price gouge.
rtx 2080 for $799
gtx 1080 was like $550
it is a huge rip off
It’s not a rip off. It’s just not for gamers. It’s meant for game developers and content creators.
Until they finally nail the real-time raytracing secret sauce, which is still very much in beta, it won’t be for gamers.
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doubt “ray tracing” is worth a $150 premium at least for gamers and they are actively marketing to gamers.
professionals buy quadros anyways
i don’t think there’s any time to notice except for the massive drop in frames…
I don’t see the use for implementing features like this in OW.
OW is built with generalized performance in mind, not necessarily how pretty it all looks. Anyone can run Overwatch.
I doubt Blizz would implement Ray tracing. It would be nice, but aside from getting over the hurdle of just adding and supporting it with the game engine, they’d need to go back and edit all the light sources in the game to give it proper appearance and affect.
Dlss support might happen though, which would be nice.
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It’s not meant for gamers, so the price premium is an early adoption fee and a way for NVIDIA to recoup the losses they would get from gouging into their own Quadro line.
Quadros don’t have the RTX technology in them yet. Furthermore, content creators are usually indie-run groups which buy “prosumer” hardware instead, so your comment of about Quadros literally only happens in larger corporate environments.
The marketing towards gamers are because NVIDIA has also invested tons of money into bringing game developers into their loop of technologies that RTX runs on. It’s not actually marketing towards gamers, it’s marketing towards game developers to use those technologies in their games. And once they have, they need gamers to have the RTX cards in order to run them.
As it so happens, games are the best way to explain and publicize the technology – the best outlet to gather a wide pool and further advance the tech.
But games aren’t the main draw here.
The main draw is for asset creation for content creation;
- realtime raytracing entirely removes the “baking” step in a pipeline of preparing assets for games and VFX
- baking is a lengthy process that must happen for each individual asset produced… completely removed because it can run at runtime/render in the game/renderer itself
- a GPU can do all of the heavy lifting of rendering an arch-viz render with realistic reflections and shadows, without much of a performance hit
- an artist can literally continue working without any downtime between renders
- having RTX tech built in also helps to accelerate all batch renders for all pre-rendered work like 3D animations, VFX, portfolios
- opens up an entire market of RTX-based batch renderers that can entirely replace CUDA-accelerated rendering like Redshift3D (the one that Blizzard uses for their animation shorts)
Just because it doesn’t have any benefit to the gamer until the technology is widely adopted, doesn’t mean it’s a rip-off. You just aren’t the target audience.
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Even if it is added, it probably not have much difference on the graphics. It is just different way to do lighting and reflections.
OW 2 may have it if it becomes mainstream.
Not to mention in a multiplayer game you need the graphics to be less intense as possible to save up on performance.
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So many experts when we don’t even have real benchmarks out yet. And don’t throw those soft benches nvidia released at me. I know they’re there, but I want to see it from a mostly impartial source.