Thanks
RaySoft
for a meaningful discussion! Appreciate it!
That's exciting for sure. It will absolutely shorten the pipeline and allow multitask shader units to operate based on demand. But the bottleneck for lighting and shading is still going to be there unfortunately.
Not at all. I'm more caught up in actual rendering of pixels as that's most definitely the final destination of the rendering pipeline and will make the most visual impact moving forward. We still have crude lighting, limited shadow generation, janky tessellation, severely limited LOD management, and big slowdowns with implementing complicated volume FX and procedural geometry/textures. These are the things I worked on and see the biggest leap in visuals going forward.
There is no other path forward my friend. We must move towards the holy grail of rendering. Screenspace solutions just aren't going to cut it anymore. We are at the limits there.
I have a friend that worked at ND before. They are commended for the hard work they do, but it is clear to me that other studios do more R&D and tech. You would be suprised at the passing of work from studio to studio.
I worked with the guy that implemented the new GGX BRDF at Disney. HIs solution was derived from months of studying all the BRDFs and coming up with the best one. When Disney released the paper and the gaming companies saw how easy the solution was, that paved the way for PBR shaders in the gaming industry. People who worked at DIsney went to work for RAD and The Order was made. To this day, many studios, including ND adopt techniques from other developers and apply their work. So I said all of that to say that ND realy aren't the magicians that come up with this stuff. It's adopted very well on the console - true, but they aren't the inventors of this tech.
I can agree that ND can make something look good because of their talented artists. No doubt. But there comes a time when you can't just fake things anymore to push the visuals to new levels. And I believe we are at that point.