Could my Xbox One-X theoretically do ray tracing on Ms. Pacman?

I'm a little confused by almost everything to do with Ray Tracing. Ray tracing is my new 'bump mapping.' I can understand why a game like Control couldn't have ray tracing on it because it already devastating platforms, as is. But could a game from the 80s, with almost zero processing and computing demand on current hardware, give me a glimpse of ray tracing on my current system?

Computer companies make it seem like you have to upgrade to get new features. But to me i feel like at this point in the lifespan of videogames all of these companies are doing the equivalent thing of telling me to buy a new car for gps or XM. I can bolt on my own solutions, thanks. So i'm just not buying this ray tracing thing. Is there no way they can deliver a game that somehow just barely eeks out ray tracing for me to witness on the console under my tv. Or did i just miss that tweet?

In theory, I suppose it is possible that Namco could find sufficient benefit to make or license a ray traced version of Pac-Man (though I'm not sure it would even work on a 2D game), and Microsoft could find a way to add software-based ray tracing to the One X, but the performance would still be in no way indicative of what you'd get on dedicated hardware.

Nvidia actually did this with their 10 series GTX cards, but turning ray tracing on in a game that offers it is unplayable. It's fun to find a place to stand still and look at the prettiness, but any movement is a slideshow. There was a version of Quake II that had ray tracing added. This video (full disclosure: I haven't watched it all the way through since he covers the relevant point in the first minute, so my apologies if the dude is a horrible person) shows the impact of ray tracing. It goes from getting 999+ fps at 720p on a GTX1080 without ray tracing to ~20 fps with it.

Ray tracing is lighting. no lighting = no ray tracing.

Try Quake 2. That's what people were using early on, it is the same exact use case as you're presenting here. If it doesn't work or you don't like Quake 2, shrug loudly and move on lol.

@aktane: Isn't the onus on the people trying to sell me something to prove it to me. I don't want to watch a video. I want to boot up a game, no matter how simplistic, and see it work. Maybe a games with gold title next month? I just hate hearing people blare the trumpets for something that a good percentage of gamers (especially if you're console only like me) have never even witnessed first hand. Show me the money microsoft.

The X1X really isn't setup for ray tracing support. Even older games like Quake 2 have higher system requirements than the X1X provides. And the issue you're gonna have in almost any case is that artists and devs have gotten SO GOOD at pre-baking in lighting that current games using ray tracing don't even incorporate every part of what ray tracing can provide. We are still a very long way away from Pixar level ray tracing being done on the fly.

Expect a lot of the ray tracing in next gen to be focused on audio, and /some/ close up lighting and reflections.

Well you can ray-trace any polygonal, shaded/textures computer rendered object.

So -in theory- if someone were to recreate MS Pac-Man so that she, ghost Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, the pills, the fruit, and the maze walls looked like blown glass the entire scene could be raytraced. What you woudl see is all the objects casting colored light, light reflections, and shadows as if it were 'in real life' all made of blown glass.

And, yes such a scene and with the simple mechanics woudl mean that the whole thing coudl be ray traced in real time a suitable frame-rate for look really nice. [ I was trying to find a picture of a Blown Glass pac-man...but I found this octopus which shows off the effect the developer woudl go for.]

But...while not the hardest thing to make; why would Namco/Midway bother? To make Raytraced glass-like Ms. Pac-Man at least a few million in development, even if ist low seven figures. However, would they SELL that mnay copies of aht at all? Meh, probably not. They could, but ist not agreta risk to resusrate an old game

@fourthline: This is like saying "why can't my '92 Civic drive itself?" The technology just isn't there yet. Ray tracing is the next thing in the pipeline of video game fidelity. Contemporary consoles aren't built for it. The same way a SNES couldn't reasonably render polygonal graphics--Starfox had to literally add hardware in the cartridge and it still looked like primitive shapes floating around--but the Nintendo 64 was built with the technology to render polygonal graphics, and so it could. Since you can't bolt a GPU to a Blu-ray, consoles will have to wait until the next generation of hardware.

This kind of thing is good though. Even though there might be some FOMO going on right now with folks who invested $2000 into their PCs so they can play Control at 30fps to look at ray tracing, soon consoles will do the same thing for far less. Games haven't had a watershed moment of "wow this looks good" in a long time. It's been a lot of incremental improvements, that have certainly added up, but don't really shock on their own. I think ray tracing is one of the few things that you can simply turn on and off and the layman can look at it and understand the improvement.

@fourthline: I don't think you are the target market for this, so they're not going to spend time and energy, especially for you, to explain next gen tech. You're not going to buy it no matter what cool things they show. they HAVE ray tracing demos, there's ton of information out there. If you're not sold right now, they should move on to the buyer who IS interested.

@monkeyking1969: I love where your head is at. you just extracted gold from this thread imo. haha

@fourthline: To be fair, unlike HDR, where you have to have a specific output device capable of rendering the colors and brightness accurately, the effects of ray tracing can very clearly be seen and appreciated by just watching a video of a game running with it on versus running with it off. This is far less of a leap of faith than HDR was. You're right that the onus is on a company to sell the product to the consumer, but any consumer should do a reasonable amount of research with any meaningful purchase.

The reason companies are failing to sell you on Ray Tracing is because the results aren't that impressive.
It's become a buzz word, your next console isn't worth nuts if it doesn't trace those rays, you're releasing a game without ray tracing, are you crazy!?
In reality it's just an expensive lighting method, up to this point developers have manually placed imaginary light sources in their games to emulate realistic lighting, very successfully i might add artists can fake reality very well, but by simulating light rays in a realistic manner, how it bounces, how it reacts to materials, how it's occluded etc... you don't have to fake it any more, the light is basically real.
But again, we've been faking it very well so is it really that impressive? For me the resource requirement isn't worth it, non of my favourite games would be better with it, in fact it would probably make them darker so they'd be worse, the biggest draw for me is real reflections but where we're at with it now it's still low enough resolution that it doesn't look real and in fact looks pretty terrible.

I'm FAR more interested in technologies like DLSS which improve performance and, in some cases, improve image quality.

@cikame: I think you're mostly right about the relative cost benefit of ray tracing at this point, but when (if?) the tech becomes efficient enough to run well it should free up a lot of time for developers since they won't have to manage the light sources as significantly. I will say that the simultaneous transparency and reflectivity in the glass in Control with ray tracing on is amazing to see. Granted, it's a very subtle thing, but it really does make it look so much more realistic.

You're absolutely right about DLSS, though. Everything I've seen of that (at least the 2.0 version) is that it is a huge breakthrough in rendering technology that will make things much less resource intensive. It's what I'm most excited about in my planned upgrade to a 30 series RTX card from my current 10 series GTX. I haven't seen much of AMD's version of it, so it'll be interesting to see if that is as capable as DLSS 2.0, and if it will be implemented in the consoles.

So you need polygons not sprites to perform ray-tracing, so it could not be done on Ms Pac-Man or any other 2D game. As others have mentioned, Quake 2 is your best bet as it is the first game made to support real time lighting. But ray tracing without built in hardware support will take up 100% of the Xbox One Gpu regardless, assuming it is used for lighting, shadows, and reflections. In CG movies like those from Pixar, rendering a single ray traced frame can take days. It’s among the most computationally expensive tasks known to man. So even an incredibly simple game otherwise still couldn’t render ray tracing in real time. The key with the new GPUs is that they have hardware level support, meaning actual silicon dedicated to ray tracing. It’s like the difference between software based polygonal games and hardware based ones. See how awful 3D games look on the PS1 compared to the N64. It was possible, but without dedicated hardware it looked and performed terribly.

@fourthline said:

You kind of need a 3D game to show ray tracing really. I think Minecraft is a good example of a simple (low polygon count) 3D game, but even that probably needs hardware ray tracing support to get a decent frame rate.

Digital Foundry has a good video of Minecraft running on Xbox series X with ray tracing, which I think looks pretty good, and presumably that would not be possible at all on Xbox one X.

PS. If Microsoft doesn't confirm raytraced Minecraft as a launch exclusive for Xbox series X they've fucked up. I don't understand why they've not said anything about this since that Digital Foundry video.

Well as i am yet to read naysayers nayasayances i highlighted the fact that the game im curious about is from 40 years ago. If Xbox can't leverage a tech demo for a game that old to do what next gen can do yet.... then i'm just looking forward to games accomplish the same amount of nothingness in innovation.. can i trade ray tracing for some storage space or something that is meaningful to gaming in 2020?

@aktane: a little condescending but ...everybody on both ps4 and Xbox one that isnt essentially trolling valid arguments on message boards, will not do the research. The kind of people doing the research are going to lean towards pc. a game that microsoft could make available to xbox players that could absolutely explain to them what they will get and why they can't get it where they currently play would do wonders for me. i've seen the videos and ive listened to boring Mark Cerny (spelling is what it is) and I can't be bothered. it isnt the snowflakes on the camera or the thousands of duckies in a bathtub. The have a means to directly deliver.. let's say a microsoft direct. they have a direct marketing box under my tv. they should use it to show me what i can do with a game i know. I'll monitor the board for your future posts. Looking for gold.

@hatking: Yah Ray-tracing really will be another milestone in graphics in a way that HDR wasn't - at least not for me. I can tell the difference between a non-HDR image and an HDR one, but depending on the game, the implementation and your TV's own capabilities, sometimes HDR can end up looking worse than regular. I know when I get my LG OLED I kept thinking "am I doing this right? Is this on?" Spending a lot of time with that CNET guide calbirating my image and still not being convinced. The first time I saw full Raytracing turned on in Control in a comparison video it was instantly evident that this is much better than baked in lighting. Even things like reflections in floors and glass.. I'm pretty excited to see it more widely used and on more affordable hardware.

@humanity: Yeah, exactly. HDR is cool and I'm glad I have access to it. But for most games I feel like I'd need a side by side comparison to notice the difference. And honestly, even then, some games just look different, not necessarily better or worse. Really, I think I notice it most with the 4K HDR treated movies I have on Blu-ray. Spiderverse was the first 4K movie I watched on my TV and still sticks out as maybe the best looking thing I've seen on it to date. Ray tracing is far more noticeable. Seeing that Quake video somebody linked earlier is a really good argument for it. It's something I'm familiar with suddenly looking much better.

It goes without saying that posters in this thread would make themselves familiar with next gen features. So wasted text. I just stopped looking up a these marketing videos because replaying games has done so much more for me than just looking at a video. I guess in my youth I had cling to every morsel of news because I didn’t have the games to keep me distracted. It’s honestly going to be really hard to get me to upgrade this time. I could have done metal gear V and rise of the tomb raider on 360 and maybe skipped the current generation completely and be more impressed.

I'm not sure what you're looking for at this point. You pass off replies to the thread explaining what raytracing is, and pre-emptively pass on videos explaining what it is from people trying to sell you on it while also saying "Isn't the onus on the people trying to sell me something to prove it to me".

Gotta love a good fourthline post and subsequent comments. Living in a real golden age we are.

Ray-tracing is not something a third party like Microsoft can apply over a game. It's not like a filter or scanlines that you can overlay on top of an existing game, it requires the developer of the game to actively make changes to their game. Think about a photoshop file. If you see an image, we only see the end-product and can tweak that image afterwards. But the original creator has the entire photoshop file with all the layers on it and is able to change the layers that make up the image. That's the type of access needed to implement ray-tracing. The lighting model or audio model has to be swapped out for this new tech and the game still needs to run well afterwards. And it turns out that we require dedicated support on the GPU to hit those goals.

Remember that Saints Row 3 remaster? At first, people were appalled that this ancient game didn't run at a super solid 60 fps on current consoles before we realized that this wasn't an average quick & dirty remaster, but an entire overhaul of many technical aspects.

The new global illumination system is radically transformative, simulating light reflection and bounce while ambient occlusion is taken care of using a mixture of pre-computed AO 'baked' into the artwork in combination with SSAO and ambient obscurance. Even volumetric lighting is implemented along with support for post-process effects including depth of field, blur, LUTs, chromatic aberration and the aforementioned film grain. You'll also notice a substantial upgrade to reflections too, with both planar and screen-space varieties used.

A ton of work for a remaster, that did get a ton of praise. Yet even this old game was still struggling to keep a steady 60 fps on the current consoles, despite merely working with pre-baked lighting sources. Imagine how rough non-supported raytracing would get!

Without dedicated support for raytracing, it doesn't make sense for developers to put their resources towards a project that is doomed to fail. However, instead of Ms Pacman, we can see it at work in 3D games like Minecraft and Quake 2. Those are the kind of projects that are meant to highlight what ray tracing can offer, given that a ton of people know what these games look like without ray tracing.

telling me to buy a new car for gps or XM. I can bolt on my own solutions, thanks.

It's surprising to see this sentiment coming from someone that is not into PC-gaming at all. When you buy a console, you kinda get what the company puts together for a wide range of players. With a PC, you get to choose the components yourself. But luckily the difference is still visible on video's, so it's not something magical that you can't preview before you decide to buy in.

Not really. Ray-tracing is primarily used to light a scene more realistically, so there's no feasible way to apply that to an old 2D sprite-based game.

Quake 2 RTX adds ray-tracing to what was already a lighting innovator for its time, and it would be hard to go back to anything much older than that and get significant gains visually from adding ray-tracing.

Again, this isn't something that's really possible. Even the Minecraft ray-tracing demo would bring the Xbox One X to its knees - it would basically be a low-resolution slideshow. In order to do real-time ray-tracing at a decent resolution and frame-rate, you need hardware build specifically to be able to do ray-tracing.

The definitive ray tracing showcase doesn't exist yet. There hasn't been enough market penetration of RT-capable hardware for developers to really start exploiting it artistically, just some relatively subdued examples of games partially integrating it into their existing lighting model (Control, Metro, the most recent Tomb Raider).

I'd guess it will be late next year at the earliest before we start seeing many examples of games where the art direction is significantly influenced by and more fully built around ray tracing capabilities.

Ray Tracing is a particular solution to the global illumination problem in 3D graphics. It recursively solves the rendering equation, which is a certain integral equation (integral equations are similar to the more familiar differential equations), via a Monte Carlo method where rays are traced from each pixel in screen space until the rays intersect geometry in world space, bounces, and eventually terminates at a light source or when they reach a maximum amount of bounces.

Every time a ray bounces it picks up some color information from the material it bounced off of. At the end this information determines the final color of the pixel in the frame buffer for each pixel. This is very similar to how rays of light work in real life which is why Ray Tracing is a cornerstone of what is called physically based rendering or PBR. However, Ray Tracing is very expensive, especially compared to traditional rasterization, which is why it needs to be hardware accelerated.

Of course, Ray Tracing doesn’t need hardware acceleration to work. It could run on the ps4, or even in software for that matter. But, the performance would be like a slideshow at best. Ray Tracing needs to be hardware accelerated with its own hardware units in a massively parallel manner in order for it to be practical. It needs silicon units on the GPU dedicated to finding Bounded Volume Hierarchy trees and to denoising. Of course, I am talking about real time computer graphics. People have been making pre-rendered ray traced computer graphics since 1978.

As for Pac-Man, that is a 2D game. So, 3D Ray Tracing would not make any sense there. I mean where would the rays going through the pixels intersect at? There is no depth.

@robertforster: lack of imagination there for Pac-Man. Tilt your 2d axis oh so slightly and voila you have 3D. Give me an in game camera. The first level. Light all elements. Require higher than normal data connection requirement. Give me a 23GB download and.. nothing? But the crackdown 3 demo.. I was lied to?

@brad While it is true that artists have not built a game completely around ray tracing yet, it has made their jobs easier by improving their work flow. Ray Tracing allows artists to place and reposition light sources without having to worry about rebaking their lighting by hand or having to wait 5 to 20 minutes for a program to calculate it. It happens in real time. Hopefully, advances like this in the game making pipeline continue to reduce developers overhead, keeping the future of videogames solvent.

executable close thread.. this is starting to play out like a boring Mark Cerny euology.

@johncallahan: I take it this is a regular thing with this guy.

You're talking about building an entirely new game at that point, and it still wouldn't run well on an Xbox One X with proper real-time ray-tracing.

You also keep bringing up things like file size and data connections, but those won't have any impact on Xbox One X's ability to do the complex calculations necessary. There's no trade-off for hardware that is built to do real-time ray-tracing. No matter how badly you want it, the Xbox One X isn't going to be able to do it at an acceptable level.

They're certainly earning a reputation.

There isn't anything requiring you to be interested in a marketing tactic, there is always the option to not be moved either way.

It has been a long cry for help for this guy.

@fourthline: I think after reading you post, and then reading the following comments on the post i have come to the conclusion that you dont have a fundamental understanding of what ray tracing actually is. AND THAT IS OKAY. I think the folks pushing this technology have done a pretty poor job of explaining what it actually does. And its hard to just show it because in the years leading up to the development of the tech, game developers, and 3D artists in general have done a pretty decent job of faking it.

To understand how it works, you first have to understand how real light in the actual real world works. Sadly im not smart enough to explain it well here, but essentially light comes from a source in beams or rays. Ray tracing is a real time simulation of the physics of light traveling from a light source and the way it would react with objects such as reflecting or scattering.

in the past lighting effects were done more or less with tricks. think if you were to draw a candle lit room on a piece of paper by hand. you would draw the objects closer to a candle brighter than the objects farther a way. this of course is an overly simplistic explanation of how they do it in games but i hope you get the gist.

Now to answer you question of can your Xbox one X theoretically do ray tracing.

yes and no.

Ray tracing is extremely complicated math and required dedicated processors to run it. which is why Nvidia RTX cards have dedicated RT cores.

that said they have done ray tracing on hardware that doesnt have RT cores, but as far as i have seen it doesnt really work well. think a Nvidia GTX 1080, which still plays most games at ultra 1080p 60+fps would be down to single digit fps on low settings if you turned RT on. At least that is my understanding.

Crysis on PS4 Pro and Xbox One X, supposedly, will support software-based raytracing, which in their words is a first. I'm just saying I am surprised by that since I didn't think current-gen could do any form of ray tracing.

@brad said:

That's what i'm worried about, in theory it would reduce some of the time spent lighting a scene right? You just place your light sources and it's all simulated realistically = less development time on lighting, so at some point there will be games that have no traditional or baked versions of the lighting, and i'm not ready to let that go, i think it makes scenes like this look worse.

Yes, this scene wasn't created for Ray Tracing specifically, but if it's an example of what we can expect i'd rather not have it.

Also, welcome to fourthline, your preconceptions of the world are about to be shattered.

@cikame: is their an adjective for profound closing statements in form and tone yet not content? Huh? Shattered? The image you have does look worse so the onus... I love when companies get all onused up and people figure shit out... for us... is maybe the protagonist in this game is knack where he brings “his own” lighting. Or maybe the character has a glow stick or an American torch or even a British torch. Since ray ray tracing is often imitated yet never simulated then maybe what I don’t know I want ( I know what I want) is a playable demo that normally would take X amount of hours to “cheat” and illuminate all ray trace like. Well cheat even more and give me Halo 1 opening scene in the most faked gameplay (that has ever been that wasn’t in engine) that can let me see what I’m getting.

Up until now I could understand what changes in media or online integration could mean for games. Or the implementation of a controller feature could do. This is the first time a console launch has gotten me to think of “if you say so.” I don’t buy off of that. I prefer sound logic and interns to get me there.

*top 10 current gen disappointments list now available.

@fourthline: I just don't think the best way to explain new technology to you is to refresh an old game using it. I think if you've seen the Control ray tracing analysis by say Digital Foundry, then you know what it is. Or tomb raider. I don't see how providing an old game that isn't 3D and doesn't have lighting, that retrofits raytracing as a demo will somehow give you more information or change your mind. Its work being done for zero return. Ray Tracing is simply a lighting technique. I don't think it will sell a console, or even a game. But games will look more natural and better with it (as you already know per the videos)

@cikame: You're kind of reinforcing my point with that image -- it's going to take time and a bigger installed base for developers to adapt their visual design to the new tech to achieve the look they want.

That said, I don't agree that the RT version of that scene looks worse. Here's another example, where the entire cave on the left is lit with the same flat, even lighting that makes the scene look unnatural and even a little garish. There's no depth to it. The one on the right has a much more dramatic, moody look as the sunlight falls off the deeper you go into the cave.

Ray tracing means the difference between huge swaths of a game being lit uniformly, vs. every inch of a game having a unique look and atmosphere due to the characteristics of its scenery and the lighting around it. The results of that will range from dazzling to mundane; sometimes a dark room is just a dark room.

@brad said:

@cikame: You're kind of reinforcing my point with that image -- it's going to take time and a bigger installed base for developers to adapt their visual design to the new tech to achieve the look they want.

That said, I don't agree that the RT version of that scene looks worse. Here's another example, where the entire cave on the left is lit with the same flat, even lighting that makes the scene look unnatural and even a little garish. There's no depth to it. The one on the right has a much more dramatic, moody look as the sunlight falls off the deeper you go into the cave.

Ray tracing means the difference between huge swaths of a game being lit uniformly, vs. every inch of a game having a unique look and atmosphere due to the characteristics of its scenery and the lighting around it. The results of that will range from dazzling to mundane; sometimes a dark room is just a dark room.

Yeah, there's also the thing that developers will need to figure out what are accurate reflective values of various materials, so much of the light we see is after many bounces and even grey boring materials like concrete and stone reflect light differently. I'm excited for the prospects of raytracing since I've been kinda bummed about how little lighting and shadow rendering improved over the past few generations. I don't think raytracing will instantly make it all look right since unless the materials are properly impemented into the system we'll just get lights bouncing against the same featureless cubes.

But I really hope that in time we'll see stuff like a room on the third floor of a building at dusk getting dimmer as a car passes by below, because it blocks the light of the setting sun bouncing off the street, as well as stuff like alleys lit up by sunlight reflecting off the windows of one building onto the windows of another building into the alley which is otherwise in shadow.

The dream scenario is of course a game that can actually simulate the effect of the Walkie Talkie building in London which had the perfect shape to focus sunlight onto the street and melt the cars parked below.

I think Metro Exodus is a really poor choice to give people context for ray tracing because it's only good at showing one of it's benefits and is already a predominately darkly lit game which doesn't showcase what is the more beneficial aspect of RT. Control still gives the best idea of how it can be used because it's art direction and lighting are already so strong and their implementation of RT shows they took the same amount of care and consideration for that art direction to maintain its strength when using RT. The below two images are the best example of this in more mundane but easily recognizable circumstances for both shadowing and reflections.

The amount of difference in visual feel from small details like self shadowing, softer shadow falloff, surface color in bounced light and accurate full scene reflections is the real and meaningful benefit of RT in the long term. It's a technique that brings subtle details to life and better ground a space and a viewers sense of it.

@fisk0 PBR albedo, roughness and metalness value charts have been a common resource used since developers began using engines with physically based rendering. The first instance I recall was when Remember Me was released. The one recurring example for material uses that irks me is the pervasiveness of chrome-like surfaces to show of the wow factor of RT reflections. It's such a garish throwback to the early days of 3d rendering with checkerboard patterns and super reflective spheres. In practice though, I've not seen many games that use reflective surfaces to show off RT reflections in that way.

I'd imagine in the end that a hybrid approach will be largely adopted to allow for the kind of art directorial control needed when it comes to lighting games. It's the one area between games and film that is shared most strongly in execution of a finished result and practical application in production. Brad's image from Metro Exodus is a good example of this where the image on the left uses a directional light and likely 1-2 ambient fill lights, where as the right one looks to only use the directional light and rely's on the few bounces it uses to fill in the rest creating something vastly different from the original and also not as readable. Granted the value of this varies strongly from game to game, Metro is a series known for very dark environments and needing to use light sources to navigate, but it still underscores that the effective use of RT is likely going to fall somewhere between current approaches to lighting spaces and letting RT do the heavy lifting for subtler details.

@fourthline https://youtu.be/zVzGCGMbrsM here ya go buddy

I'm on my phone and because my lights are out I can't seem to do the "embed video" thing but I think you'll want to see the above video!

Crytek just announced ray tracing for Crysis Remastered on PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X. You can see it in action on digital foundry