New Brigade 3 update! A TRUE next gen gaming engine.

Another 2 months, another Brigade update. They've been coming pretty regularly lately. Sam and his team have updated their blog with new Brigade pics, which as far as I know, is the only serious real time ray tracing engine in development. For those of us that have been keeping up with it, it's been in development for a couple of years, and they really seem to be positioning themselves as true competitors of the Unreal and Cryengine for the REAL next generation, which imo, will skip right over the PS4 and X1.

While Epic and Crytek are still shackled by next gen consoles, and having to deal with all the overhead of the current state of rasterized graphics, these guys are building a lean, mean, powerful real time ray tracing engine. Their only last major hurdle is minimizing the noise, which they have done a wonderful job over the past year, and basically plugging in all the necessary development tools that devs are used to from the major engines in order to make game development easy. The engine already has physics and animation capabilities and has been demonstrated plenty of times in previous demos.

They have been touting Brigade 3, the latest Brigade iteration for some time, and I believe these images are from the latest build. It seems they have a surprise coming, and these images appear to be just a tease to what I would expect to be a video release soon. This thing is looking good, it's for real, it's near, and ray tracing has never been closer to reality than Brigade.

Just in case anyone is not clear, no, there is no way in hell the PS4 or X1 will run this or anything similar. Maybe if they stream it from the cloud. But that's about it. And on that note, Brigade has been been demoed running on Nvidia's OTOY cloud renderer server, so that's something to keep in mind. Either way, this thing will make the X1 and PS4 look like the original Wii and I don't think I'm going to be able to stand by and wait once it hits the PC.

So for those PC gamers still on the fence about upgrading to the new AMD cards, is it even worth it with this around the corner? Brigade 2 has been confirmed to run on a Titan GPU or equivalent at around 25fps-30fps. Even though Brigade 3 will be further optimized, I still feel you might be able to run the bare bones engine, but an actual game running it will no doubt be a different story. And I imagine the better the GPU, the less noise.

It's been a long time since I was a PC gamer. This is the first real reason to come back to that side and drop this kind of money in a long time. I expect the first games using this to come out around 2015 so it might be time to go ahead and start saving for it now. I honestly can't see myself waiting 4-5 years to get my hands on this tech(been waiting since the early 1990s!), unless MS and Sony really pull of cloud streaming properly.

The only question is, which dev is going to jump on it first and what will they make with it? And what kind of pushback will Brigade see from Epic and Crytek if these guys get the jump on them, which right now is looking pretty likely? Do they have a chance to steal the show?

Everything below is fully ray traced. No tricks. Just a real global illumination ray tracing engine running in real time. Though you can still notice some noise here and there. Enjoy!

Would have felt better about the next console generation if it looked like that.

Yap. I honestly don't see the next console generation as the next generation of gaming, in terms of graphics. I think the next generation of gaming will start with real time ray tracing capable devices. That's what's going to define it. PS4 and X1 are not really capable of bringing any of the major next-gen effects to life and into the market, at least not out of the box. They're mainly designed for the same evolved rasterized hacks and effects that have been around for the past decade.

That looks amazing, but if the next-gen consoles can't use it, then I can't imagine many big games will come out that use it. Part of the appeal of something like the Unreal engine is that it can run on just about anything. This seems like something that will only work on the highest end PCs, at least for a few years, and that's just not a huge market compared to consoles.

I believe we shouldn't go this far for graphical fidelity. Video game development is expensive enough as it is, and I really don't want this industry to die out from poor sales that equal to 10 million sold copies and not the contemporary 3 million.

Hey, that stuff looks kind of ok

Sounds like something a decade away. This generation is going to hurt publishers really bad if every game is out to achieve these visuals with that scope. Technology was never a limit, It was resources and time. It's not always about performance, it's also about efficiency. The engine puts out some fantastic images but I would be hard pressed to see a city in a video game look like this good for a long time. It's a nice goal and maybe with the power of the cloud we could see some application of the techniques sooner.

Nope. One year away.

That engine has everything in it: physics, animations, post processing effects. It's a full fledged gaming engine. Should run just fine on the new AMDs R290s especially with Mantle. And the Maxwell cards coming out next year will most likely be geared more towards ray tracing as well, not rasterization. So a middle of the line Madwell card might work as well, at least for minimum settings.

And the beautiful part about it is a game with that graphical fidelity takes a fraction of the effort that a currently rasterized game takes to achieve close to that.

While those images do look fancy and all that I'm still not convinced that we'll see anything playable looking like that in the near future (or a year from now)
Unless of course the guys spending their time and money on this engine are the ones saying "Nawh brah, it can totally do that" because that would be a new thing we haven't heard before.

But again, they made those stills look fancy as hell that's for damn sure.

They are. Brigade 2 was running on a single Titan at about 30fps. They're entering their ~4th year of development and they're serious enough to defy even the mighty John Carmack.

While I don't fully agree that we need another magnitude of performance (Brigade can path trace outdoor scenes in real-time today with very little noise), it is great to see that path tracing is acknowledged by Carmack as the eventual future not only for offline rendering, but also for real-time game graphics. The future of GPU path tracers like Octane/Brigade has never been brighter. - Sam Lapere

John and ID is just behind, that's all, which is probably unfamiliar territory for him to be in that position. Or he's obviously thinking in terms of consoles, and referring to the fact next gen consoles will hold this back. But these guys don't care about the X1/PS4. They're not limited to thinking on that time frame.

The engine is owned by the same company behind Otoy and the Octane cloud renderer. They're not doing it just because they can. They're doing it so they can license it. And I'm sure they'll be offering cloud streaming solutions as well.

This is a sneak peak of Brigade 3, the third major iteration of the engine which is supposed to be, according to them, 3x as optimized. Those aren't just stills. I don't think people understand the jump graphics will see just from being able to run the first real time ray tracing engine. Not just lighting, but polygon counts. They've pushed the engine at over 13 billion polygons, fully ray traced. I really expect it to be a bigger generational jump than what we're currently seeing. In terms of polygon count alone, it will be more like 2. They're getting ready to release a video unveiling of Brigade 3 so stay tuned.

Just for geek trivia one of the programmers working on optimizing Brigade 3 is Haissam Keylani, aka ICEnhancer, behind the ICEhancer GTAIV mod. Wouldn't be the first time modders and hobbyists push the industry forward. Counter Strike and the Voxel Farm engine(now licensed for Everquest Next by Sony) are two big examples I can think of off the top of my head.

I can only imagine what he's going to do with GTA5 if he can mod Brigade into it.

This is damn impressive, that's for sure. Can't wait for more games to reach this level (say, ArmA 4 or Battlefield 5).

PS2 tier graphics, it's over, Brigade is finished

Joking obviously, this looks amazing holy shit

I just came across this post on his blog from earlier this year:

Sam Lapere said...

Hi, sorry for the delay in answering. Great to see so much enthusiasm :)

Anonymous, Teemu, colocolo: the session was recorded and shoulds appear on Nvida's website soon. I will post a link once it's there.

Mark: yes, we've been approached by some of the largest game developers in the industry to use Brigade. Unfortunately I can't tell which ones.

MrPapillon: exactly, we still need some work on the tools side of things, but we're getting there

Reaven: Brigade is actually quite easy to develop game content for. There are almost no corner cases compared to a rasterizer. You don't need to worry about transparent surfaces, hundreds of lights, shadow map resolution, depth of field artifacts, ...

The tech is not fully there yet, but we have made enormous progress over the course of one year (a year ago, I never thought we could do the massively dynamic scenes that we can do today) and I'm convinced that we will have a very compelling product very soon.

March 19, 2013 at 8:39 PM

Oh snap! Hmm I wonder who it is?

Sam Lapere said...

To be honest, I couldn't care less about MS or Sony or any other next gen console manufacturer. A Brigade powered game will probably not run on PS4 or Xbox and cloud gaming will make consoles obsolete in a few years, so your best bet will be Brigade games in the cloud.

Ouch. MS and Sony better get them clouds ready soon.

Anonymous: this is still Brigade 2 with some features from Brigade 3 (if you will). Brigade 3 is currently under heavy development and its quality of lighting and materials will blow you away, it's of a completely different level compared to what we have now and is offers the same quality of Octane (minus Oxtane powerful material system).

Octane and Brigade are siblings but whereas Brigade is targeting real time path tracing, Octane is a real fast ray tracing renderer for all the major 3D design programs, from 3D Max to Maya to Blender. Brigade and Octane are both owned by Otoy.

Octane renderer:

The jolly dancer used in Brigade videos scanned in Lightstage, but rendered in Octane.

Brigade 2 real time path tracer:

If they're implementing the same material system as in Octane that means it will literally be a breeze for devs to dump their assets out of the major 3D graphics design programs into Brigade. From 3D scanning real people in Lighstage, motion captured with similar tech the guys at Crytek are doing for Ryse, straight into the photo realistic real worlds of Brigade to path tracing actually being better suited for Occulus Rift. We're going to be approaching spooky levels of realism soon.

I'm wondering if they're going to try running it on the R9 290x, because everything has been pretty much exclusive Nvidia hardware. Would be interesting to know which one helps clean up the noise better, 290x with Mantle and OpenCL or Titan and Cuda.

Either way, I'm beyond pumped.

For me, Voxels are the future - because that's how the real world works in terms of atoms. Voxels lend themselves to dynamic physics simulations and procedural generation. Highly interactive environments. I've read that Raytracying doesn't do *Dynamic* all too well - nonetheless, Raytracing sure looks shiny!

Are Voxels and Raytracing mutually excluding one another?

I am more excited about Voxels, even if they're a lot less shiny - they've just got so much more potential for interactivity, at least as far as I can tell as a layman.

Pretty sure you are a bit confused as to what the two are. Voxels are actually pretty hard to animate.

But you are talking about two different things. Ray tracing refers to a rendering technique and competes with other rendering techniques like rasterized graphics. Voxels are competing with the polygon and point cloud data. It's more of a geometrical construct. What your geometry is made of.

Ray tracing or path tracing doesn't really have issues with dynamics as far as I know anymore than rasterized graphics. Quite the opposite, it's what's going to allow for all your dynamic lighting. (Though things like fur, volumetric smoke are going to be a pain in the ass due to the amount of computational power).

Now there is such a thing such as sparse voxel octrees cone tracing which is a cheaper form of path tracing using a voxel grid and was supposed to be part of Unreal Engine 4, and something that might still show up to some degree in the X1/PS4, but it's a less accurate solution to path tracing that doesn't give you all the benefits or quality.

But yes, voxels are cool too and Project Spark and Everquest Next are making great use of them. Just not the cone tracing part which is really where the current excitement is with voxels. Or was going to be, before it turned out the PS4/X1 couldn't do it so UE4 stripped it out. Big blow to the technique, imo.

But if you like Bunnies, how about a Brigade, path traced bunny, with Lightsaged jolly dancers pushing 9 billion triangles per second:)

@alexglass:

I got not first clue about these things really. That's why I'm asking. Are voxels and raytracing mutually exclusive?

If I get your meaning, you say voxels are an alternative to polygons, but raytracing is an alternative to current rendering techniques - so they are not mutually exclusive?

Yeah in away, because I believe ray tracing really needs to be done on polygons. Both can be rasterized though, which is what we're currently using, and what all your games are doing, as well as the two voxel engines that are being used for Everquest Next and Project Spark.

Path tracing or ray tracing attempt to emulate how light actually behaves in reality. It's an actual dynamic, living abstract object that interacts with objects, in the virtual world that can be manipulated. It's a different method of rendering your frames.

Like this:

You really need some form of ray tracing to do this. Liquids, water, transparent glass, lenses, reflections, index of refraction and realistic material shades. It affects everything from the way a mirror works to the way silk, chalk or leather looks.

Ray tracing(traces light from the camera, or pixels, to the polygons to the light source)

Bi-directional path tracing( traces rays from the camera to the polygons and from the light to the polygons, then combines the results).

Rasterization(no basis in reality, it just views the camera from behind the scene, and tries to figure out which triangles are in front of the camera, and in front of each other)

Rasterization is really cheap at low power levels but it can't do a lot of the realistic lighting effects we see in nature. Ray tracing or path tracing is very intensive, and requires a lot of computational to get it up and running(a Titan). but gives you everything you see in nature: accurate reflections, lights and shadows, refractions or caustics, transparencies, etc..

In addition, rasterization becomes more and more inefficient after a certain polygon count because every time you need to show a frame, it needs to calculate the entire scene. Then it tries to figure out which ones to display by seeing which ones overlap the camera plane. Path tracing works the opposite way. It only cares about what the light rays discover. So most of your computational power is going towards calculating the actual path of the rays, their interaction, and and how many rays per pixel you want to trace. So it's mainly limited by resolution, not polygon count. So once you get it up and running, geometry budgets become less of an issue And at a certain point the two techniques converge and the lines cross.

We're basically there today. So basically right now these guys are doing path tracing at 720p on a Titan. And at this resolution and power level, not only do you get all the lighting effects that can really be only achieved with path tracing, but it truly blows away rasterization in geometry. To give you an example The Dark Sorcerer demo on the PS4 used about 1 million polygons for the set whereas Brigade has been shown to be capable of displaying 13.2 billion triangles, fully path traced.

Now, on to voxels. Voxels are just 3D constructs, volume based:

Triangles vs voxels:

Voxels have a harder time achieving smooth surfaces, but they do have their advantages though currently they're best suited for terrain.

But like I said, Voxels have their own version of path tracing, voxel cone path tracing(which is a lot more complex to explain), and it gives you some of the niceties of path tracing. It'is actually something that might show up on next gen consoles in some fashion. I viewed SVO cone tracing as the transition tech, between rasterization and path tracing. But judging by the fact UE4 stripped it out, and no devs have demonstrated it in an actual game or announced to be using it, it's not looking good. The only thing we saw was a simple PS4 demo at Gamescom running without octree implementations..SVO cone tracing will be really heavily dependent on PRT textures to make it work, and both consoles are suited for that, however, they still require some processing power for the octrees in order to scale the scene properly. And the demo they showed didn't have it implemented, didn't have any physics or A.I. capabilties and was missing the octrees. .I think MS/Sony really missed the boat on this as well.

And similar to path tracing being suitable for polygons, SVO cone tracing is best done on voxels, and you really have to voxelize your scene before doing it, or turning your polygons into voxels(which is what UE4 was doing). The issue with SVO cone tracing is that once path tracing can be done in real time, which is basically now, it kind of makes the tech obsolete before it even really takes off. Not to mention most devs are so used to working with triangles.

Hope that helps clear it all up.

@alexglass:

Much appreciated.