internet CD project red says Ray Trixie is not a gimmick
hey internet Gordon with PC World I'm here at GDC with Kuba nopik he is the VP Global art director
of CD project red and we just went through a great demo of path racing that's going to
come soon for cyberpunk but the important thing I want to talk to an artist so he is the artist
that has created the beautiful night CD in uh cyberpunk and he's going to explain to us why
path tracing is awesome and why you should stop calling Ray tracing a gimmick
yes I'm gonna give it a shot okay all right so uh why it isn't a gimmick or why why why why do
we defeated the name of it well why do we why is it so amazing because I I mean your his words you
said that path tracing is Christmas for artists it is you know Ray tracing was already used quite
broadly actually in Game of industry for a couple of years and it is actually helping it is helping
that's why I wouldn't call it gimmick it is actually helping to solve certain problems
quality problems and visual problems in games and for some players you know let's say let's honestly
say visuals are also extremely important and many many players actually play games
also because individuals are in some cases because of the visuals mostly so you know it
is important but path tracing is like a next step of evolution of that because Ray tracing
is solving certain individual elements of the equation of the rendering lighting so it fixes
the Shadow or it fixes the reflections or it fixes the occlusion all those elements layers are stuck
up on top of each other and generate the final image while path tracing is like huh let's not
do all those individual layers there's just a one proper unified rendering and the outcome of it is
that the app the image that you're getting is way more balanced it's way more accurate and it's way
more beautiful in the end and you get enormously beautiful graphics on in your game that looks very
much like the rendering in a filter animated films in the past because it is you know the
technology is actually very close to the one using the films and in animation uh in couple of years
already so it is you know but you're playing it in real time right earlier you mentioned
like like pre-bake lighting models yes you have a very limited amount of uh light sources right yes
well the budgets but the bigger the game is the smaller the budget but we call the budget and game
day budget is just how much stuff you can actually put in a game and still make it performant that's
the budget so when you are relying on a more classical approach you're always playing back
and forth with your budget so how many lights can actually cast Shadow how far the global
illumination can be counted this kind of stuff and with you know with path tracing and rtxdi
which are some of the systems that we're using uh you actually kind of flip the table a little bit
in the approach because with the solution we came up with with with Nvidia well we didn't
come up with we worked on this but implementing it to cyberpunk we actually totally take out the
budgeting of uh of the of the lighting and we have unlimited amount of Lights casting Shadow
and generating in accumulation until Verizon they all generate perfect beautiful gradients and super
balanced image so yeah the beauty is there the beauty is there and realism is there and for our
game you know the the the the realism was always a very important factor and as a backdrop for our
mature storytelling in the game okay uh and so basically you are if you already own cyberpunk
yes you say you play through an ultra when the tech demo comes out it's worth playing through
again like yes yes we are releasing it on the 11th of April so very soon as a technology preview it's
very important I recall it like this because we're still working on this technology with Nvidia and
we plan to have it more or less brought up on our next release but uh it is so cool already
it is so gorgeous to play this game already that you figure that will release a technology preview
with a note you guys need to be aware that it's still in making and still work in progress thing
uh and yes if you have a powerful PC I still need to say it it is a technology of a future
but if you already have a very powerful PC you can play it it is Hardware agnostic so it doesn't
really matter what kind of brand of the car you have it just you just need to know that it's very
powerful honestly speaking and you can play it hmm uh the other question I have is as a developer you
know you're basically doing multiple light models in a way now yeah do you look forward to not doing
it the old method are we going to get to that point where you don't have to do pre-bake lighting
and well I think that currently we're showing it as a glimpse of the future as a glimpse of what we
as a developers would love to have you you know we would love to be Unlimited by by the the budgets
by the technology in delivering what we think is actually absolutely gorgeous stuff for the players
so it is a glimpse of our future we still have to you know support old pipelines and all Hardware
platforms so it's not like it's flipping the pipeline today but we think that it will flip the
pipelines of the future dramatically it will make it way easier to make games visually it will make
way nicer games overall and it'll make developers happier and we'll manage to actually shorten the
time span needed for delivering a game because if it's quicker if you can quickly generate
the final look you're looking for you know it makes the the production quicker right right so
five or six years I mean we're looking forward looking you know we'll get rid of the older models
but right now hopefully but you prefer obviously the look of the of the newer path Trace model over
you know there are many many ways of solving the the rendering problems you know there are many
other Solutions in the market like lumen in Epic which is also amazing so you know there are many
technologies that try to solve that this is one of them and this is this is definitely something
that would like this approach is definitely something we'd love to use in the future as
our main approach oh okay uh and the last question when is it going to come out when can people get
it people can get on 11th of April so very very soon uh it's a free patch for PC as a technology
people let me say it again cool and definitely you want high-end hardware for that yes you want to
have very high-end Hardware products cool well you know what I love high-end hardware and I like it
when people take advantage of it so yeah thank you for the talk our next guest is Paul Kozlowski he
with Nvidia a senior developer technology engineer that sounds really fancy to me can
you tell me what that role means at Nvidia yes so yeah in the kind of like the death deck we
call ourselves we're kind of like being we're just like group of rendering engineers and we're being
deployed to different you know game devs okay um kind of like support them in integrating some of
the real-time you know Graphics algorithms of the future like recently half chasing so like so and
again you know Patrick is a demo that we saw here pretty awesome by the way coming out pretty soon
um but can you tell me what Nvidia Technologies are implemented in in this in the version that
we're seeing right that you're taking advantage of I guess yeah so the entire idea like even pushing
the real-time path chasing it definitely relies on rtxdi for computing all the direct elimination
and then we're using you know um path chasing to compute the indirect uh part of the render
equation let's say um to make a performance enough you definitely need you know the 40 series gpus
um mainly because they are the most powerful they do support dlss3 you know the super rest
that was there already but we also now have frame generation which is also very important below the
puzzle and scr which is Shader execution reordering which is basically like helps
um you know execute incoherent workloads like bug tracing which is full of them um in kind of like
performance manner on the GPS so you know I we saw I got I think I saw this at copy text three
years ago quick two RTX yep fully passed traced game pretty cool but that is a 23 year old game
how in the hell are you able to do a triple a title with path tracing now and still
be playable frame rates be playable yes on the latest Hardware so we got the new hardware we
got the new magical dlss3 um and we got you know working a city project for many years
we already had all the building blocks through Ray chasing we already had BBH
um we already had you know material system visible to Ray tracing Pipeline and we just like kept the
building on this and all these things came together that we have enough performance we
have amazing algorithms like rtxdi and all these things together just made it possible I guess so
the hard work display content that we are able to pull this out can you say what level of graphics
card you're going to need for this because I think everybody's going to assume 40 90 but right so we
are aiming for you know a good experience on 40 series gpus across the board okay you talk with
super excited you know as a visual artist creating these worlds he was very excited about this uh
this move and from your point of view from a hardware side do you think we're going to
get to the point where most games might be path race or at least developers might consider that
is the first option yes I strongly believe so you know like this is an algorithm that's been used
in offline worlds for years right and there's a reason for that it's like it's just one of
the best things we have to simulate the real life lighting right and just being able now
to finally bring it to the games in the real time I would say why why bother with something else if
you can have this true true and I guess you know again the developers are saying it's just so easy
so much easier in some ways uh yeah it's you know predictable it's kind of instant um you don't need
to you know deal with setting up all your probes and whatnot just like set up your geometry set
up your lights set up your camera and it kind of just works yeah you know that's something I think
it needs to be said a little louder is that this is a model that has been used in the offline world
what do you mean by the offline world uh like you know movies when you know rendering can of single
frame can take they have unlimited unlimited time right right getting kind of minutes hours days um
and so yeah that's the offline work basically like CG animated movies right so essentially by offline
I guess or not real time not interactive means you have predefined set of frames and you just have
to make sure that each of them statically looks amazing right with interactive uh entertainment
like games when you have inputs from the player you never know what will be my next frame and we
have only like you know 16 milliseconds let's say uh to generate that frame so slightly different
problem right and we're just getting a step closer to every day we get a step closer to
it right correct yep and then again it is a tech tech preview Tech demo so not not everything is
going to be fully nailed down let's keep working on it and keep making it even more amazing cool
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