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Hot take: fuck pathtracing, fix the god damn LOD already

Is LOD woke???

  • Yeah it's gay af

    Votes: 47 83.9%
  • No, I'm blind

    Votes: 9 16.1%

  • Total voters
    56

The Cockatrice

I'm retarded?
Yes, I love PT, but I am so tired of playing every single game with tiny rocks or tiny bushes or whatever else popping 2 feet in front of you from thin air, or textures changing quality as you move closer, or the distance LOD being a fake texture hidden behind DOF or fog, and anything else related to LOD being shit. There are some games with nice draw distances, such as RDR2 or KCD2, but overall, I want infinite LOD, no more hidden tricks, no more seeing grass vanish or appear out of God's ass, no more popping, none of that. I want to see the exact same amount of detailed tiny pebbles and patches of grass at the furthest point of the map that you can see.

Please.

Thank you for reading my TED talk.
 
Problem is if there was zero pop up in games, you would probably need a 6090 just to hit 60fps at 1080p in most games lol.

Having said that, it would be nice if the PC versions at least got a 'ulitmate' future proof settings or something where pop in is turned off, or at least pushed waaay off into the distance.
 
Yes, I love PT, but I am so tired of playing every single game with tiny rocks or tiny bushes or whatever else popping 2 feet in front of you from thin air, or textures changing quality as you move closer, or the distance LOD being a fake texture hidden behind DOF or fog, and anything else related to LOD being shit. There are some games with nice draw distances, such as RDR2 or KCD2, but overall, I want infinite LOD, no more hidden tricks, no more seeing grass vanish or appear out of God's ass, no more popping, none of that. I want to see the exact same amount of detailed tiny pebbles and patches of grass at the furthest point of the map that you can see.

Please.

Thank you for reading my TED talk.
Couldn't agree more. What's the point of all these RT features when you still have muddy ass textures.
 
Yeah it's really lame. I hate it, and I hate modern devs relying so much on RT and PT for the lighting. Why don't they just bake their lightmaps? Fucking hell man, you compare Assassins Creed Unity which had baked lightmaps and it looks way, way better than Crimson Desert with it's reliance on RTX and all that fucking noise everywhere (edit: I mean the interiors). Games keep looking worse while running worse.

ES0GuwPG6A1URUV7.png
 
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I want infinite LOD, no more hidden tricks, no more seeing grass vanish or appear out of God's ass, no more popping, none of that. I want to see the exact same amount of detailed tiny pebbles and patches of grass at the furthest point of the map that you can see.
I also want infinity VRAM, but... 🤷‍♂️
 
Why not both?

The future direction for all geometry seems to be streaming/infinite LoD. Both AMD (using DGF) and Nvidia (using Mega Geometry) are onboard with integration into virtual geometry frameworks like Nanite. In fact, they are onboard with having all geometry stored directly in the BVH, so that it can be path traced as well.

24avO9wElpQlOHII.gif
 
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Yeah it's really lame. I hate it, and I hate modern devs relying so much on RT and PT for the lighting. Why don't they just bake their lightmaps? Fucking hell man, you compare Assassins Creed Unity which had baked lightmaps and it looks way, way better than Crimson Desert with it's reliance on RTX and all that fucking noise everywhere. Games keep looking worse while running worse.

ES0GuwPG6A1URUV7.png

Why do you think Unity didn't have dynamic TOD? Only few presets.

Also, this requite SHIT TON of time, they have to precalculate every scene, and then when they change something (move chair for example) - they have to do it again. Games were also simpler in the past (and that includes Unity).

It can be done for some kind of games but realitime GI is the future - that's why you see everyone going into that direction.
 
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It did not, but it will. We will likely see it first on TW4

I doubt it. it already has issues streaming in assets, and streaming assets can not really be fixed by nanite.

and loading in assets also has a GPU and CPU related cost, so you can't just render tons of foliage 300m in front of the player without tanking your performance, be it with or without Nanite
 
I'm not as big of a graphics whore as I used to be. I don't need ray tracing much less path tracing. I'm usually too busy with the action to be admiring the scenery. I usually have to hit the pause button to see the benefits. I think it's nice but I do think eliminating pop in should be the first priority.
 
Yeah it's really lame. I hate it, and I hate modern devs relying so much on RT and PT for the lighting. Why don't they just bake their lightmaps? Fucking hell man, you compare Assassins Creed Unity which had baked lightmaps and it looks way, way better than Crimson Desert with it's reliance on RTX and all that fucking noise everywhere. Games keep looking worse while running worse.

ES0GuwPG6A1URUV7.png
Man just compare Dark Souls 2 original lighting against the new Path tracing mod.

There's a world of difference. And lighting in CD just got fixed on console. On PC it was always great with RR activated.
 
The worst is when its that really obvious circle around the character where things are able to load in properly. I think the two recent Zelda's suffered from this? Pretty sure Rebirth did too.
 
Two words: virtualized geometry.
Still not perfect, but lightyears ahead of all classic technologies and already available with UE5 and Anvil.
 
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I doubt it. it already has issues streaming in assets, and streaming assets can not really be fixed by nanite.

and loading in assets also has a GPU and CPU related cost, so you can't just render tons of foliage 300m in front of the player without tanking your performance, be it with or without Nanite
The paradigm is shifting as we speak. GPU work graphs will be used for a lot of dispatches that are currently on the CPU as well as GPU accelerated geometry formats (like DGF) will gain traction with GPU decompression, so the CPU is going to get freed up a ton to handle streaming, animation and the like. Shader compilation and PSOs are still an issue, but that's not relevant for fixed hardware, and for PCs, it's a matter of time before someone figures it out.

See Nvidia's work on foliage mega geometry where they are using OMMs to accelerate foliage rendering, even outside of path tracing. All that's going open source later this year, so it's not going to be vendor locked.

It will be years before we hit the sweet spot, but I believe TW4 will be the first to get close.
 
Yeah it's really lame. I hate it, and I hate modern devs relying so much on RT and PT for the lighting. Why don't they just bake their lightmaps? Fucking hell man, you compare Assassins Creed Unity which had baked lightmaps and it looks way, way better than Crimson Desert with it's reliance on RTX and all that fucking noise everywhere (edit: I mean the interiors). Games keep looking worse while running worse.

ES0GuwPG6A1URUV7.png
Crimson Desert's map is several times larger than ACU's and has a fully dynamic day/night cycle with weather conditions. Doing good lightmaps would have taken a comical amount of time and storage.

What's more egregious is the lack of proper denoising even on PC due to the low ray count. Sure, keep that 1/16 ray per pixel on consoles but may be give the option for 1/4 or 1/8 on PC.

That and the most infuriating thing with that game is the aggressive, immersion-breaking, pop-in.
 
The paradigm is shifting as we speak. GPU work graphs will be used for a lot of dispatches that are currently on the CPU as well as GPU accelerated geometry formats (like DGF) will gain traction with GPU decompression, so the CPU is going to get freed up a ton to handle streaming, animation and the like. Shader compilation and PSOs are still an issue, but that's not relevant for fixed hardware, and for PCs, it's a matter of time before someone figures it out.

See Nvidia's work on foliage mega geometry where they are using OMMs to accelerate foliage rendering, even outside of path tracing. All that's going open source later this year, so it's not going to be vendor locked.

It will be years before we hit the sweet spot, but I believe TW4 will be the first to get close.

Mesh shaders are GPU accelerated since 2018 and we just have few games using them. This transition is so slow, fuck me...
 
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Mesh shaders are GPU accelerated since 2018 and we just have few games using them. This transition is so slow, fuck me...
I think fragmented hardware support (like base PS5) has a lot to do with that. Let's hope next gen doesn't have such crucial upgrades on the chopping block
 
You should see how bad its in Forza horizon 6. Even with everything ultra, you can almost see a horizontal line that the grass etc start to even change color and get more dense once you are getting closer to that area.

The line is always there and it's very distracting.

It's not much visible in the cities. But in rural areas ? Holy God it's so distracting.

Like wtf this was a problem in Forza horizon 5 and I was like that's fine it was programmed for Xbox one .

What's the excuse here ?

And while at it, fuck path tracing to be honest. The only time I see a reflection is at the back glass of the car when I pass a neon light or something stupid. And this can be easily faked. Who really pay attention to the other path tracing lighting ? Dude just give me better car details and stop wasting time on this shit tracing


It's like it's almost a rule now to these devs, they think if their game has no ray tracing it's not gonna sell. C'mon now
 
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I think fragmented hardware support (like base PS5) has a lot to do with that. Let's hope next gen doesn't have such crucial upgrades on the chopping block

I think primitive shaders on PS5 are basically doing the same job, no excuses for them. Developers doing one game for 5-8 years is the worst problem, all that time and they can't find any time to implement this shit :messenger_grinning_smiling:

Same thing is happening with fast loading (using hardware decompression on PS5 and XS) and to a lesser degree: RT.
 
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You should see how bad its in Forza horizon 6. Even with everything ultra, you can almost see a horizontal line that the grass etc start to even change color and get more dense once you are getting closer to that area.

The line is always there and it's very distracting.

It's not much visible in the cities. But in rural areas ? Holy God it's so distracting.
In the cities have you seen the disco temporal noise in low light areas? Atrocious.
 
You should see how bad its in Forza horizon 6. Even with everything ultra, you can almost see a horizontal line that the grass etc start to even change color and get more dense once you are getting closer to that area.

The line is always there and it's very distracting.

It's not much visible in the cities. But in rural areas ? Holy God it's so distracting.

Like wtf this was a problem in Forza horizon 5 and I was like that's fine it was programmed for Xbox one .

What's the excuse here ?

And while at it, fuck path tracing to be honest. The only time I see a reflection is at the back glass of the car when I pass a neon light or something stupid. And this can be easily faked. Who really pay attention to the other path tracing lighting ? Dude just give me better car details and stop wasting time on this shit tracing


It's like it's almost a rule now to these devs, they think if their game has no ray tracing it's not gonna sell. C'mon now

In the cities have you seen the disco temporal noise in low light areas? Atrocious.

Just drive slower.

fca5b5b8b053cb7b87530ce58fa88d6e.gif
 
It's why I can't be arsed with console gaming anymore. Just play on PC and max it out, some games have mods to push the LoD even further. Although it's not as bad as the PS4 days - HZD was fucking painful with all the pop-in.
 
Yeah, it's very annoying.

It's really bad in Crimson Desert (most recent game I've played where it was extremely noticeable). Like others mentioned though, Crimson Desert also as really janky lighting.
 
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Just drive slower.

fca5b5b8b053cb7b87530ce58fa88d6e.gif
I know you are joking. But The problem is the line is really close to you. If it was far, then who cares of whatever. But it's like almost in the middle of your monitor with the car barely below it .

Not acceptable to be honest.

The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 out of 10 for such a fantastic game otherwise
 
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As a console gamer, fuck path tracing and LOD.
Give me good IQ at 60fps (or more), then we can start worrying about everything else.


I mean that's exactly what Nanite is for but y'all also hate Unreal Engine 5 for some reason.

🤷‍♂️

Because good LOD is wasted on a game running at 720p and 42fps
 
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