Consoles are the perfect platform for a proper pure ray tracing revolution.
Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is really expensive, and you can't stuff enough ray tracing hardware into a GPU which can also run traditional graphics for older games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach, with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics.
However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake it...
Ideally you'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but that's a very hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
I believe with an existing BVH acceleration structure, the average case time complexity is O(log n) for n triangles. So not constant, but logarithmic. Though for animated geometry the BVH needs to be rebuilt for each frame, which might be significantly more expensive depending on the time complexity of BVH builds.
It's also only O(log n) if the scene is static. Which is what is often missed in the quest for more photo-realistic graphics - it doesn't mean anything if what you are rendering only looks realistic in still frames but doesn't behave realistically if you try to interact with it.
What if we keep the number of triangles constant per pixel, independently of scene complexity, through something like virtualized geometry? Though this would then require rebuilding part of the BVH each frame, even for static scenes, which is probably not a constant operation.
> Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects
Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?
Combining both ray tracing (including path tracing, which is a form of ray tracing) and rasterization is the most effective approach. The way it is currently done is that primary visibility is calculated using triangle rasterization, which produces perfectly sharp and noise free textures, and then the ray traced lighting (slightly blurry due to low sample count and denoising) is layered on top.
> However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene.
That's also true for modern rasterization with virtual geometry. Virtual geometry keeps the number of rendered triangles roughly proportional to the screen resolution, not to the scene complexity. Moreover, virtual textures also keep the amount of texture detail in memory roughly proportional to the screen resolution.
The real advantage of modern ray tracing (ReSTIR path tracing) is that it is independent of the number of light sources in the scene.
>Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
I'm not sure that's actually true for Sony. You can currently play several generations of games on the PS5, and I think losing that on PS6 would be a big deal to a lot of people.
Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is really expensive, and you can't stuff enough ray tracing hardware into a GPU which can also run traditional graphics for older games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach, with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics.
However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake it...
Ideally you'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but that's a very hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.