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Ps2 was capable of realtime raytracing.

So apparently the ps2 was capable of realtime raytracing and even more imprssive it could do that without using its cpu.



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DeepEnigma

Gold Member
I feel like the only games that would work for the ps2 raytracing is silent hill 2/3. Maybe some racing games??? Don’t you need real lighting for raytracing to work?

You can use pre-baked or dynamic setups with just ray traced shadows, AO, reflective surfaces, etc..
 
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I think what is happening is that the scene is being rendered into a texture and that texture is being texture mapped onto the sphere is really impresive as this kind of effects consume lot of rendering time as you have to render the scene or part of it 2 or 3 times, because of the amount of work required some games with mirrors or water only mirror part of the scene, more simple versions of the scene or miss certain objects like characters
 
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DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Sony has been working on it for quite some time. Polyphony Digital has done many GDC panels on RT from the PS3 with GT as well.

A good indication to which future tech will be utilized in future generation consoles is to pay attention to those GDC panels.

Here is when they showcased 8K/120fps/HDR/RT for GT at GDC this year.





 
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I think what is happening is that the scene is being rendered into a texture and that texture is being texture mapped onto the sphere is really impresive as this kind of effects consume lot of rendering time as you have to render the scene or part of it 2 or 3 times because of the amount of work required some games with mirrors or water only mirror part of the scene, more simple versions of the scene or miss certain objects like characters
Which is exactly what the PS2 excelled at. The fillrate was insane so I from what I've read a lot of special effects were done by simply rendering the frame a few times. That's why some games from the PS3 gen seemed to have less effects (one thing that sticks out for me is GT4 has that heat blurring effect, but I'm pretty sure 5 and 6 didn't).
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
exactly, ps2 was designed this way as some kind of future proof I remember some comments that mentions it can do 16 times the entire screen

I always found it so impressive that while it lacked a few “modern” features and had others not really working well (anisotropic filtering lod calculation, a problem PSP kind of inherited), it could do things other HW could not even dream of doing and would still have a bit of a cold sweat doing for some time.

Try to switch texture, blending mode, primitive type (say from triangle strip to fan or viceversa), and flush your depth buffer... essentially switch render state per object you render and see if the performance does not tank on other GPU’s.

For me PS2 is a bit like The Barbican here in the U.K. (London): it took past problems/bottlenecks (as well as perhaps old approaches to break free of them) and used the best tech it could to solve them with a mix of elegance and brute force/raw strength. In some cases it was forward looking (VU’s for example) and in others it was an evolutionary dead end... but what a swan song it was ;).
 
Pretty much any 3D system is capable of real-time raytracing, since it can be implemented via a software solution. I suppose PS2's particle fillrate bandwidth would give it some type of advantage, but aside of that it doesn't have anything in particular that made it capable of ray-tracing and Xbox/Gamecube/Dreamcast incapable of it.

Just for commercial software at the time, it would have been a very dumb idea to implement because you'd have VERY little resources left for actual game assets, logic, AI etc.What would be more interesting is seeing a game with PS2 or PS3/360-quality assets on next-gen systems with ray-tracing. They would likely be able to push full-on ray-tracing in real-time, whereas most next-gen games with next-gen tier assets will be lucky to get partial, selective ray-tracing at most.
 
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ethomaz

Banned
Ray-tracing is possible since the first 3D card was showed because it is just an alternative algorithm to rasterization.

Now specific hardware acceleration on both GPU and consoles are the first time.
 

Spukc

always chasing the next thrill
wow according to console makers next gen consoles are going to be like 4 2080ti's
 
Pretty much any 3D system is capable of real-time raytracing, since it can be implemented via a software solution. I suppose PS2's particle fillrate bandwidth would give it some type of advantage, but aside of that it doesn't have anything in particular that made it capable of ray-tracing and Xbox/Gamecube/Dreamcast incapable of it.

Just for commercial software at the time, it would have been a very dumb idea to implement because you'd have VERY little resources left for actual game assets, logic, AI etc.What would be more interesting is seeing a game with PS2 or PS3/360-quality assets on next-gen systems with ray-tracing. They would likely be able to push full-on ray-tracing in real-time, whereas most next-gen games with next-gen tier assets will be lucky to get partial, selective ray-tracing at most.
Gt sport have been experimenting on it, at 8k 120fps i bet the ssd is the real hero behind this



Go tp the 7.30 mark
 
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That's what I would like to see too.
But rt depends on resolution and it will be pretty hard to sell a 720p cell shaded rt game... DF will count pixels and shit all over it.

Suppose an indie game could go for it, because a mainstream AAA game surely won't. I get mad sometimes thinking about PS3/360 gen because the jump to using HD assets meant less fancy visuals compared to what probably could've truly been done if assets stayed near GC/Xbox/later PS2 quality.

Granted the industry maybe made the right decision as a whole going forward, and it's always tough to choose between framerate and visual fidelity, but it would still be cool to see.

Gt sport have been experimenting on it, at 8k 120fps i bet the ssd is the real hero behind this



Don't know how much a SSD (even a custom one using persistent RAM) would benefit a process like raytracing which IIRC is a lot more dependent on real-time data calculation than speed of transferring large data assets across a bus. But that does look pretty cool.
 
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GHG

Gold Member
Pretty much any 3D system is capable of real-time raytracing, since it can be implemented via a software solution. I suppose PS2's particle fillrate bandwidth would give it some type of advantage, but aside of that it doesn't have anything in particular that made it capable of ray-tracing and Xbox/Gamecube/Dreamcast incapable of it.

Just for commercial software at the time, it would have been a very dumb idea to implement because you'd have VERY little resources left for actual game assets, logic, AI etc.What would be more interesting is seeing a game with PS2 or PS3/360-quality assets on next-gen systems with ray-tracing. They would likely be able to push full-on ray-tracing in real-time, whereas most next-gen games with next-gen tier assets will be lucky to get partial, selective ray-tracing at most.

Yep, you can even do real time Ray tracing in the browser using javascript these days (albeit in a very limited capacity).

 

RealGassy

Banned
Hearing about this years down the PS2's life cycle seems weird.
That's just a bunch of assorted demo-scene effects.
Calling a scene consisting of one plane and a sphere "real-time raytracing" is reaaaaally stretching it.

There are many nuances regarding raytracing.
What's the scene complexity? Couple spheres and a plane? Quake 2 poly counts?
What's the resolution? How many rays per pixel, how many GI bounces, etc?

2080 TI can do Quake 2 RTX, with two GI bounces (I think), at 1440p at 60fps.

Curb your enthusiasm.
 
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Green_Eyes

Member
I remember a Cube (GCN magazine) review of Starfox Adventures admiring the 'ray tracing' in the game; I wonder if it was facts or misused lingo...
 

LordOfChaos

Member
Any CPU or programmable GPU can ray trace, the question is obviously how many rays it can handle.

Wasn't there some truck game in the PS3 era that used a small amount of ray tracing, also a few titles like Fortnite touch up a few shadows and things like that with a very small amount of it.

The difference with what's coming up is techniques like inferencing and denoising allowing dramatically more of the scene to be ray traced even if hardware power had remained stagnant

I still wish we got the originally planned gpu developers that had worked on the ps2 for the ps3.

I'd be curious to see it, but obviously it had to have ended up substantially worse than the RSX for the last minute swap in.
 
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DeepEnigma

Gold Member
Nintendo 64 raytracing at a blazing fast speed 😂😂:



I'd love to see more old hardware raytracing.


Framrate is on point, maybe if they added a lot of “fog” they can improve it a hair more ;)

In all seriousness, cool stuff. I like seeing these types of tests as well.
 

Myths

Member
Real-time RT, but how quickly is the question. Almost anything can really, the FPS would just be abominable.
 

Gp1

Member
The multipass rendering thing is the cause we always get some kind of blur image in ps2 emulation, for example?
 
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01011001

Banned
every 3D capable machine can do raytracing... literally all of them.

it's not about "if" it's about how fast.
 

thelastword

Banned
I always found it so impressive that while it lacked a few “modern” features and had others not really working well (anisotropic filtering lod calculation, a problem PSP kind of inherited), it could do things other HW could not even dream of doing and would still have a bit of a cold sweat doing for some time.

Try to switch texture, blending mode, primitive type (say from triangle strip to fan or viceversa), and flush your depth buffer... essentially switch render state per object you render and see if the performance does not tank on other GPU’s.

For me PS2 is a bit like The Barbican here in the U.K. (London): it took past problems/bottlenecks (as well as perhaps old approaches to break free of them) and used the best tech it could to solve them with a mix of elegance and brute force/raw strength. In some cases it was forward looking (VU’s for example) and in others it was an evolutionary dead end... but what a swan song it was ;).
The PS2's engineering design was indeed a marvel......It was above other consoles in so many ways.....Thanks to Ken Kutaragi and his beast mode mind.....
 
Nintendo 64 raytracing at a blazing fast speed 😂😂:



I'd love to see more old hardware raytracing.


The N64 architecture was based on SGI's RealityEngine, which was used in Onyx and Crimson workstations. Early N64 games were prototyped on both workstations. So yeah, the N64 was capable of doing ray tracing just like the SGI workstations were at the time. But it wasn't implemented in a way to run in real time. It was intended for pre-rendered images and videos.

In many ways the PS2 is like the bigger brother on the N64. The PS2 uses a MIPS R5900 CPU, while the N64 uses a MIPS R4300i.

every 3D capable machine can do raytracing... literally all of them.

it's not about "if" it's about how fast.

yeah, this is true. It just comes down to how fast the machines can render each frame. Even non-3D specific hardware can do it. This 'Juggler demo' that was developed on an Amiga with 512KB of RAM in 1986 is one of the earliest examples of ray tracing on a desktop PC.



This was rendered at 24 frames per second and each frame consists of 64,000 light rays and took one hour per frame to render.


Here's some examples of ray tracing on an Amiga 500:

 
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Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
I don't quite get it. What is raytracing and why is it all developers can talk about? Is it actually the game changer they try to portray? To me it just looks like slightly improved lighting/reflections. Does it take a lot of time/effort to get this working as well? I feel like we have long since reached the point of diminishing returns with graphical fidelity. I feel more effort should be placed in focusing on gameplay and game systems - especially if this adds even more time/money to the development of a title.
 
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DarkestHour

Banned
Ray tracing has been around for quite some time. I remember seeing and old ass ray tracing demo using Link or something where he was all gray. Really wish I remembered where I saw it.
 
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I don't quite get it. What is raytracing and why is it all developers can talk about? Is it actually the game changer they try to portray? To me it just looks like slightly improved lighting/reflections. Does it take a lot of time/effort to get this working as well? I feel like we have long since reached the point of diminishing returns with graphical fidelity. I feel more effort should be placed in focusing on gameplay and game systems - especially if this adds even more time/money to the development of a title.
It's just a different algorithm for finding where light goes. Computer graphics is typically all about finding clever ways to approximate realistic graphics, but ray tracing is a brute-force "shoot a bunch of rays from the light source, follow them through a reasonable amount of reflections, then use that info to figure out the lighting/shading."
 
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