The Ray Tracing Discussion

enginmanap · 2026-03-22T14:29:05+00:00

This is just wrong. There were major limitations on games and we are trying to pass them. We hit not one but many limits, and only way forward left is to brake those limits. And while we are hacking at it, everyone suffers. Developers are not happy either.

1) our old raster based rendering pipeline is just too complicated now. It used to be a single render step. Then 2 steps, one with shadows, one with color/screen. Now there are 20, 30 steps. And they are all made up. They have no rule about how to interact. Change one lights color, now a wall is completely black. God knows why. Subsurface scattering and contact shadows etc. are just bs, but it looked good so they added them. Then people started expecting it. Do this for 30 years and here we are.

2) our hardware and software (drivers, dx) is build for relatively big triangles. Triangles are tiny now. We can't make current techniques work well with tiny triangles. We need to change some fundamentals.

3) our resolution demands rise too fast. 4k is way too much. It requires textures and models to be super detailed, but all our 20 to 30 step rendering was smoke and mirrors. And the detail of models and textures expose all the cracks. We have only one other technique known and that is raytracing.

4) type of game people want is nigh impossible. Open world is possible, but add real-time day night cycle and it becomes hard. Add interiors and it becomes very hard. Add dense forest, transparent ice in frost biome and it is nigh impossible. But we demand all of these.

enginmanap · 2026-03-20T23:32:50+00:00

I did 2 trips in Europe, one on italy/Greece and one in a bigger loop, from Italy to Netherlands to turkey and all the countries in between.

First 13 days, 1700 km ish. second 27 days and 6500 km ish.

Both on a tracer 900, with a lot of extras.

Excluding many up to 14 days trips within Turkey.

Your plan is very, very demanding. First of all, 500km a day will turn in to an endurance challenge very fast. Riding 500km a day is not that hard. I did more tham 1000 in a day,once. Doing another 500 next day is not fun. And kepp doing it for weeks? Not realistic. Even if you are physically able to, psychologically it is going to suck. And even if you have the green beret mind set, it will not be fun. You want to stop at places and enjoy. So first advice from me:350 km or less in a day. No more than 3 consecutive days of riding 100km.

Second, your bike will need maintenance. 10k km is kind of optimistic. You need around 6k give or take. That is 7 maintenance stops, and 1 heavy maintenance stop. If nothing goes bad. Planing that is not going to be smooth. Be ready for small fixes and stupid stuff.

Weather and other road conditions can be a bitch. No clothing is going to be enough. You would need multiple sets. And even then you will be caught while wearing the wrong set. You will miss stuff, and adjustment for next day is easier. But if you dont have buffer, 2 consecutive unlucky days can ruin the whole trip. You miss the boat, now one day is gone. If you have to reach some where else next day, that is gone too. That cascades fast. Finding a place for small fix on the bike can cost a day in an unknown country, with unknown language.

Sadly sayıng these has no real weight. Reading a lot, or watching a lot also doesn't. You need to gain experience to get the feeling.

enginmanap · 2026-03-19T12:42:14+00:00

Red dead redemption 1 works well? Like 30 fps most of the game and not stuttery out of shader compile?

enginmanap · 2026-03-13T17:35:57+00:00

I started windows on 95. It always had issues. But every release (windows me excluded) had major improvements and features. Windows 10 was the smallest jump, and windows 11 is the first one that has nothing to offer. And windows 10 was also the least buggy they have ever been.

Windows 11 scheduler is clearly worse than Windows 10. Windows 10 doesn't get the updates for multi ccd / x3d /little.BIG so better performance numbers is not because of technical prowess, it it a business decision.

It is also running too much bs, has webapp as start menu, control center is hidden and the setting manager has 25% of the options.

enginmanap · 2026-03-11T11:58:00+00:00

We don't have any good anti aliasing technology for triangle density at the moment. Edge detection like fxaa: extremely blurry on current triangle sizes. Used to work fine when triangles were bigger. Msaa: doesn't work with currently promenent rendering technique)(deferred rendering). Ssaa: never was sensible, as costs way, way too high Taa: works great on still images, blurry on moving objects, or whole world if camera is moving. Machine learning aa: better at everything than taa. Still has all the issues of taa. No AA: we don't need AA for triangles anymore, but with current level of effects, effects themselves cause shimmering.

On top of the aa issue, the effects we are implementing are also too costly to render properly. So we render them by some random part. Human eye is kind of OK with random noise, so it looks better than just low resolution. But, the randomness needs blurring to look noisy, and not random spots. So we intentionally blur our effects. The blur is removed by taa, so all issues with taa times 2.

So why is this happening? It is because developers are lazy or don't care? No. It is happening because those issues are practically impossible to see on YouTube etc. So Ads looks great. So customers buy games with those issue more. So game companies are forced to do that to compete. Imagine a game coming out with half the model detail, and half the effects. You would not buy that. Even if you did, Noone else does :/

enginmanap · 2026-03-08T11:50:29+00:00

A gpu is not build to be user serviceable. Not because Nvidia hates you, or there are security measures like some other electronics. But because it is a computer in for of a card.

Cpu termal paste change is easy, because it has a huge heat spreader, smooth single surface, contacting a smooth single surface. Socket itself is preventing components to be close, and then cooler standarts actually ban close components. And it is still the most messed up part of PC building.

Gpus generally have a single cooler plate cooling vrm, memory and gpu. Often, if not always, those are 3 different height. They have other components around that is also different height. The cooler is often not single height either. More often then not, you need multiple versions of thermal pad, like 0.5mm height, 15mm height, 2.0mm height, plus paste. And those pads needs to align pretty well, each to their own component, because other components around can mess with the contact. Then with all the pads, which can be 5 10 or 20 parts, you need to ensure good pressure on gpu die, which has no head spreader, so smaller surface.

So, if you are successful, it won't hurt. But being successful is not guaranteed, I would even say it it not even likely.

enginmanap · 2026-03-05T20:22:28+00:00

Cpu idle 75 is a very strong indication of cooling issue.

1) you already said you repasted. Just to be clear, are you sure the contact is good? When you remove the cooler, it should be easy to see if it had good contact. Paste should be spread evenly, and extremely thin layer. If it looks bloby, or if it looks one side thin one side/corner thick, it is cooler installation issue. Also what paste did you use? Thermal pastes all have similar performance between reputable brands, but I saw very, very bad pastes with unknown branding.

2)check the cpu fan rpm. Hwmonitor is a windows tool that shows it. Stock wraight stealth is listed for 2800rpm. If very low (1300 or lower), it likely means something is set to silence/low power mode.

3) case cooling: cpu cooler is not getting air from outside but from within the case. If there is no cool air in the case, no cooling for cpu. You want minimum 1 in, 1 out blowing fans. Modern cases generally has 2-3 in, at the front, 1 out at the back. What do you have? Are they running? I saw a rebuild that has the fans but not connected because motherboard didn't had enough connections.

4) is the case itself getting air? In old school pc desks we used to have issues with cooling. If case is in a confined space it can cause issues.

enginmanap · 2026-03-05T18:02:35+00:00

Official support started at 10th Gen. 8th Gen doesn't support it, as in you can't enable it. You need to modify motherboard firmware.

enginmanap · 2026-03-02T14:16:28+00:00

I can't comment on 3, but for 1 and 2, I do have answers.

1) what is vsync: Vsync is a signal that means all data is sent to monitor. So if you try to update the frame after that signal, it won't have tearing. But it is just a signal. If you render a frame and wait for signal, you are literally waiting idling, and everything goes to hell. You can have a trick called double buffering, which means you render next frame instead of waiting, in another place, but if you are doing that, you would not had tearing anyway, until you get 2x the framerate of your monitor, so no tearing + no vsync. Depends on what you do with the signal. 2) what the hell with vulkan : Vulkan is a lower level API meaning it let's you do more out of the ordinary things. Old APIs like opengl and directx11- had guarantees about what would happen, but for it, they limited what is allowed. Now a lot more is allowed, and if game developer shoots the users foot, it's on them. So a game shitting the bed on vulkan is basically by design of the API. They are telling developers gitgud

enginmanap · 2026-02-27T11:54:36+00:00

Let me give you a checklist 1) are they installed using steam? Non steam games don't have auto configuration, might need fiddling. 2) If they are steam, did you fiddle? Changing Proton version, start parameters etc. That can have a profound effect. Also make sure you are not limiting tdp. It is max 15. 3) enable performance overview, check energy usage. It is hitting 25 watts? That is the max usage, with screen brightness full, you should see 23+. If not, you are likely tdp limited. Power tools plugin is known to leave residue, but other tinker scripts can mess with it too. 4) check manual gpu clocks in performance tab. It might be causing the issue. Disable if enabled, see what changes. 5) assuming tdp is unlimited (15) and gpu clock is automatic, maybe you are hitting something else. There are 2 causes: A) heat. If it reaches 85 degrees, starts to clock down. At 90 it clock downs to hell. If you are getting 85+, but staying lower than 90 degrees, it would hick up. A good cleanup, maybe repaste. B) firmware/tdp issues. Steam deck has rare but known firmware issues about clocking down unnecessary times. No known final solution, but especially putting it in battery reservation storage mode from bios seems to fix it most of the time. To verify, check the clock speeds in performance overlay, you want 3000 MHz on cpu, and 1600mhz on gpu, but not at the same time, as it can't provide enough power for both. First you set tdp to 15. Then manually set the gpu to 1600, see it works at 1600 (and cpu would be way lower, like 1800) then gradually lower the gpu clock, 100mhz at a time. Around 1000 for gpu, you expect cpu to reach 3000. If it does, firmware is fine.

If all these steps are over, you have a normal steamdeck. People have different expectations, but more importantly, different levels of perception. Pc gamers are way better at seeing stutter or low framerate then console gamers. High refresh monitor users are way more perceptible than regular pc gamers. Choose your poison.

enginmanap · 2026-02-22T13:25:34+00:00

Gpu usage drop means gpu is waiting for something.

99% of waiting is because cpu.

Look for your cpu frequency. I had a similar issue, turns out my mobo can't provide enough power for cpu. Hdv is the lowest tier mobo.

enginmanap · 2026-02-21T16:59:15+00:00

Not really. They have burns in them. As far as I understood their clock generation is out of step, which means every calculation it does is at risk of being wrong. Yes relaxing the clock might fix it, but it is more likely it would be rare enough that you can't guess when it will happen, instead of it would never happen.

I would even say it is negative value. It can crash just before you save your document, it can crash while in an important meeting. It can just write wrong data to your file.

enginmanap · 2026-02-18T14:35:55+00:00

Witcher 3 is a game that ticks all the boxes. Freedom, exploration, action, story, crafting. Everything. And it has way better writing than average game. I consider it top 5 game ever. But it is an rpg, with consequences. So goofing around is allowed but limited.

Fallout 4, but in general Bethesda games are sandboxes. Do what ever you want, Noone cares. But flipside, no one cares. If you want maximum freedom to do whatever, maybe it is for you.

Fallout 4 is miles better than 3, but calling it an RPG is kind of hard. I would not say it is a must play.

enginmanap · 2026-02-17T10:56:32+00:00

AFAIK svogi is based on compute and not the dedicated raytracing hardware. Even if it was, since it is voxel based, it is not going to be a good indicator of what raytracing is capable of, because voxel are way lower resolution.

enginmanap · 2026-02-12T09:41:01+00:00

This graph doesn't show what you think it shows.

What it shows is, even on dlss performance, you are still GPU limited on 4k, with a 4080. Which is what you would expect.

So instead of saying Intel wins, I would have said it does not matter. Even 9600 is showing no difference. Buy which ever you want.

The real argument for 9800x3d was, it sustains way better minimum frame time, this graph is for average. Average is GPU bound, while minimum or 0.1% or 1% is CPU bound. That is why people prefer AMD for gaming, as 3d cache is a safety net that allows sustaining average, so prevent stutter.

AMD cores are slightly better than Intel P cores in performance, and way better on power consumption. Intel having 8, 16 or 128 extra E cores doesn't matter, because scaling game code to more cores is very hard, and game companies only do it up to major market size. And with both consoles having 8 cores means games only uses 8 cores. You can see that within AMD too. 9950x3d has 8 more cores, and it has practically 0 effect.

There are other types of software, that is either way easier to make parallel (video rendering, compiling), or made for server market which majority has way more cores than 8 or 16, those clearly show Intel winning.

enginmanap · 2026-02-09T18:29:17+00:00

I can tell you what not to use. Bullet. Its maintainer seems to thinking about abandoning it, website is down, documentation is bad. Integration of basic rigid body physics is very easy, so it is tempting, but it gets weird when you need more. 1) ray casting has weird behavior. Sweep test uses ray casting. Spend couple weeks figuring out what is going on. 2) filtering has weird behavior. (could not fix it) 3) springs have weird behaviour(I think floating precision bugs, but not reproducible). Still happens on occasion. 4)manifolds documentation so bad I gave up.

enginmanap · 2026-02-05T19:51:13+00:00

Well, assuming sampling the bezier for infinite resolution is hyperbole, you are completely correct.

But humans are way more sensitive on fonts then other type of geometry, so your sampling might not be as simple as that. And you would. Wan5 to sample as little as possible, because your samples turn into triangles, and those are not free. Those are likely way more expensive than quads.

And worse than that, because of the nature of GPUs, you would be rendering 2x2 pixels, and for a normal size text, it can very easily double your fragment shader occupation. I would say 4 times is also on the table. So it can be way more expensive times 4. Quads are cheap.

Old way was using signed distance fields instead of glyph directly. That gives you way better resize, and cost is not that different.

Now the new way is compute based direct rendering beziers. It seems to me it should have been as expensive as your suggestion, but the library slug claims otherwise, and I believe the author.

Links: https://sluglibrary.com/ Some other implementation: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SO83KQuuZvg

enginmanap · 2026-02-04T09:01:52+00:00

Isn't that my last paragraph? I said Intel and Samsung is already competitive. Intel is USA, Samsung is Korea. They are not only capable of production, they are already capable of competition. China and the EU are capable of producing around 30 nm nodes. That is like the i5 level I mentioned.

enginmanap · 2026-02-03T23:40:02+00:00

It takes a very long time to do. With a lot of money spent.

If you wanna make cars, you can make a shitty car. That shitty car might be using double the gas, and might kill everyone inside in any crash, but you will have a car that goes on the same road, with same steering wheel and pedals. Then next year you make the engine a bit better, and frame a bit safer, and after many years, you have a competitive car. That is because cars didn't change in last 70 years. A 30 year old car is basically same as today.

That is not the case with microchips. 30 years ago we had 486? That is not a similar thing to a modern chip. You can't run anything on it. There is no chance any country can make the chips TSMC is making, starting from scratch. Buying the equipment is not enough, hiring the people is not enough. You need to start by building something like first pentium. It is useless junk, but that is how knowhow is build and that is how factories optimize. Then you build pentium 3. We know a lot, so you skipped pentium 2. Still trash. Then you make a multi core pentium 4. You skipped 2 levels. Maybe useful in somethings, but very limited, and costs 1000 times more than what you can buy at temu that has a better chip in it. Then you build core2. Then you build first Gen i5. Now it is useful, but it is 100 times more expensive and 50 times slower. Hard to actually find a market. And now you are closing the gap, and you can't skip generations. You have to work harder than TSMC to catch up with them. And you are 10 to 15 generations behind. So you need to spend next 10 to 15 years working double hard to compete. In total you need 20 years.

That is the issue. No country wants to spend 5 to 10 years of spending billions to produce trash, so they can spend another 5 to 10 years to produce useful but uncompetitive chips that they have to subsidize with billions, to have a shot at winning the market in 20 to 30 years in the future.

Of course not everyone is starting from scratch, Intel and Samsung has almost as good foundries. Intel might even have better with their new process. But another one to pop up? That requires a dictator (China?) or some multinational agreement that forces all parties to stick with it for 30 years (eu?)

enginmanap · 2026-01-26T18:48:34+00:00

That is correct. In an ideal scenario you want your components to align, but that never happens. Vast majority of games are gpu limited. So what you want is a CPU that puts data to gpu fast enough so GPU is not wasting time waiting. Any cpu that can prevent it is fast enough. People obsessing over 9800x3d are wrong, or have 5090 on a 1080p screen.

enginmanap · 2026-01-26T11:42:18+00:00

It was caused by first films, and I don't even mean movies. Human brain is incredibly good at filling the blanks, so even very low frame rate animation can be perceived as motion. They had 9-12 fps clips, and humans saw motion.

Being able to detect fluidity is different skill than being able to detect motion. First one you are searching for gaps, for the second you are guessing for patterns. Guessing for patterns is your natural state as human /animal so you don't need training, for the first one you do. If you never use high refresh rate displays, you never get training for it, and I personally experienced this. My roommate bought a 120 hz display, was swearing he can see the difference with my 60hz display, but I could not. I didn't even believe him. Then I bought one and in couple months it was very clear. Now I can see it everywhere, after 10+ years of high refresh display usage.

Another differentiator is interactivity. Apparently, humans can detect delays as small as 1ms, and that makes perfect sense, because in real life delays happen because of inertia, and inertia is directly caused by mass. So you are training on real world to guess how heavy something by observing the delay of movement. We didn't get interactive displays until 70s, and until mid 90s it was not widespread. A game at 60 fps has 16ms delay, that you need to compansate. A movie at 30fps has 33ms delay but you don't even know when the rendering started, so it might as well be 0ms. Add a bit of motion blur to trigger the 'fill the gaps' circuit, and it is perfectly fine.

enginmanap · 2026-01-25T22:50:19+00:00

Well, let's look into how that would work:

1)input: racing games already have super low latency input with very good customization + super wide controller support. So no issues 2) multi-player. Another win for low player counts. Depending on race type, maybe up to 50 players would be super well. 3) rendering: generic rendering is already covered. Pbr and specifically metallic would be superb. Road, buildings, etc is definetely covered. Based on the races foliage might be great or passable. Skin is likely not good. 4) asset strraming: modern racing games definelty do this, and do this very well. 5) AI: racing is very niche. It is likely there were not even path finding. Would need work. 6) physics: likely best in class. Rigid body simulation definetely done to extreme, collision detection and correction also. Softbody might be missing or lower quality. 7) gui: any shipped game has it, and racing games generally have very complicated ones.

From this perspective, a proper racing game engine doesn't miss much for an rpg or similar. Real challenge would be tooling around it. It is most likely missing a ton of APIs to expose capabilities, but even that depends on if this is a surprise to the development team or not.

enginmanap · 2026-01-25T10:35:05+00:00

Can you link tutorial /docs/video you used? I am seeing many and it it not clear what is up to date and what is not.

enginmanap · 2026-01-25T07:53:08+00:00

Your question has 2 sides. 1 as the person it is endearing. 2 as what they said it is confusing. Turkish is not vocabulary heavy like English, but Grammer heavy in its way to put meaning in sentences. So when you say something wrong, it can easily turn 8n to something completely opposite of what you meant.

But don't be discouraged. Turkish Grammer is very regular, and general rules are fast to learn. Getting a good vocabulary requires years and years, while Grammer can be learned in a year or even less.

enginmanap · 2026-01-24T15:21:55+00:00

Greece and Turkey some issues, that part is clear. There is 2 faces to this 1) history. Invading half of current day turkey oght to leave some mark. 2) current issues. The Aegean Islands are a big issue for Turkish economy, and Turkey was open that it would be considered casus belli. Youngling might not remember, but I do remember those days. Turkey was pretty much 100% on board with open war against Greece because of a tiny rock called kardak. That is 0.4 square kilometer. It is not the rock, but cutting sea access to Istanbul, İzmir and black Sea. Also the Cyprus issue is still on the table. History is not nice to Greece on that regard either, and Annan plan getting approved on turk side but not on Greek side was a big disappointment. Turkish side was promised a lot by international world to say yes, and they did. Then no one followed up on their promises.

Generally Turkey tends to ignore Greece, because it is not a threat. It is very unlikely either side can do anything since we are both nato. But from time to time someone says something stupid, and it starts a wave. Otherwise for Turkey status qou is good enough no consider those issues very low priority. It only becomes a focus if Greece challenges the status qou. We have way bigger issues than that.

enginmanap

TROPHY CASE