Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Raytraced lighting?

Has Larian mentioned anything about having raytraced lighting? While reflections might be cool one couple shiny platemails, I think where it would really make difference are contact shadows and global illumination. In this kind of sandboxy and dynamic game, you can't bake the lighting into the textures. Having proper shadows and illumination from torches, spells, movable objects etc. would really bring the graphics to next level. It'd give the graphics more depth and less fake gamey look that many have complained about (i.e. too bright, not bg1/2 like).

Next gen consoles, Nvidia graphics cards for 2 years and new AMD cards this year all support raytracing on hardware level, so it'd be a shame if was left unused.

I don't know that there is any concrete information available about how the Larian engine renders scenes, and , of course, it's still being developed. Even with relatively dynamic lighting, it may possible to pre-calculate and store the effects of individual lights as an optimization.

I'm still not sure of the utility of RT hardware, to be honest. It isn't absolutely necessary, as you can do RT on the CPU, or using shader code on normal GPU stream processors; just not as efficiently.

There is always a question mark in a GPU if you add special purpose silicon, since you do so at the expense of general-purpose silicon. How do you balance the number of RT units against unified stream processors when you don't know what functions a game will want most? How do you design your shaders and asset pipelines efficiently when you have a different balance of RT to SP on different GPUs?

This has happened already with specialized tessellation hardware, among others, which allows you to smooth curved surfaces or add additional detail not in the original asset geometry. But it's often not necessary, requires totally different asset geometry format, and can end up being a bottleneck on the overall frame rate. As a consequence, it is often ignored making it wasted silicon.

That said, there are many frequently used geometric and optical calculations that might benefit from RT. Ray-object intersections for geometric calculations and ray-cast primary shadows are obvious candidates, in addition to reflection and refraction effects. Occlusion and radiosity for global illumination are also possibilities.

In the end I think it will be down to developer experimentation. I can see console titles benefiting the most, simply because of the high number of identical hardware units, and the need to use everything they have available.

NVidia's RT, on the other hand, seems to render a low-res image and uses their deep learning silicon on the latest GPUs to predict the correct lighting when upscaled to full output. I'm not sure what that would do for non-render calculations.

Wait and see, I guess.

Damn...ray tracing...there goes another $1000 on an updated GPU - im hoping the early access will give us an idea of what we need to run this game & whether to get a new system or buy a PS5 or Xbox series X & wait for the console release ! - off topic sorry....the game is looking very nice already

I expect ray tracing support may appear in drivers for recent GPUs even if they don't have dedicated hardware. You might want to save your money until your sure it's worth it.

I thought that already happened?

I still think of ray tracing as the software that could render an imagine of a glass sphere and a metal cone on a wooden table in 2 hours. Amaze your friends with the realistic shadows and reflections on random simple shapes!

It’s nuts this becoming a thing for games.

Yes for one generation of NVidia, not sure about AMD/Intel, and I'm not sure the x-platform x-vendor APIs are settled yet. Unless you really need to buy right now, I would wait to see what the 5th gen consoles and the NAVI2x & Ampere GPU ranges have to offer later this year.

yes it does all seem a bit OTT for the dollars involved....I guess its realism but the cynic in me saays its all about the $$$$ for the industry