Ray tracing in gw1 through rtx remix

  • Didn't know whether to put this under mods thread but apparently nvidia rtx remix is out and I was wondering if anyone's tried to apply ray tracing to gw1.

    Edit: in case you didn't know rtx remix is it's an nvidia platform that allows modders to apply ray tracing to older games for supported gpus.

    Edited 2 times, last by Kryth Vocans (August 14, 2023 at 9:14 PM).

  • Runtime User Guide
    Combined repo for the RTX-Remix runtime. Contribute to NVIDIAGameWorks/rtx-remix development by creating an account on GitHub.
    github.com


    Tried to give this a whirl but either I couldn't do it well or my graphics card wasn't good enough to handle all the changes (or both). At any rate I couldn't make a good remix, but if anyone here has a good gaming pc do post the results here yus?

    Edited once, last by Kryth Vocans (October 19, 2023 at 10:15 PM).

  • I'm sitting on a 4070 Ti since I do 3D-modeling for a hobby, so I gave it a spin.

    First of all, there's no how-to here. I failed as well and if you expect a solution, sorry. But maybe some people are interested in what I found out, as well as some technical details. We're deep-diving into bridging after all.

    Everything really just went darker, except for the main menu, oddly enough. There, the models on the character select buttons merely stopped rendering. That's almost to be expected, really, they are rendered on a different layer. Anyway, I didn't bother. Default setting is a minimum of zero rays, I cranked that (and maximum) up to enforce some tracing. No changes. While this is an odd thing in itself, ray- and pathtracing are VERY fickle. Just because the geometry in a scene doesn't seem to react to the rays doesn't mean they aren't hitting the camera at all. Luckily, remix does have some other settings that may show what's going on. I tested in Kamadan at first, but moved to Embark soon, since it has very visible shadows and some water.

    Here's where it got interesting. I started to play around with the settings that were most likely to produce a difference. Modern games often offer something called "Global Illumination". Oversimplified, GI is often vastly expanded indirect lighting, where it'll bounce off not only reflective surfaces, but also those that barely reflect light. If it's activated and light sources aren't adjusted accordingly, everything will get noticably brighter. Example:

    GW1 went darker with Remix and wasn't designed with GI in mind, so it should get brighter, especially with insane settings. It didn't. On the plus side, we could add some charcoal textures and have global Nightfall?

    Finally, I checked the light statistics. No sphere lights, no rectangle lights, an extreme amount of distant, disc and cylinder lights that would kill any game engine and... ZERO total lights? I guess I should be grateful my graphics card isn't on fire right now, but it's still weird.

    At this point, my last hunch is that there is some odd render layer that remix is trying to apply its shenanigans to. But I'm calling it at this point.

    Edited once, last by Finnfinn (October 21, 2023 at 3:34 PM).


  • Thanks a ton for your pro input. And yes, if anyone's gonna give this a spin enter at your own risk as it could drive a graphics card to overheat. I called it a day when mine started to heat more than usual as well.

    I'm hoping perhaps a newer version of RTX Remix could be more compatible with GW1 I dunno. Here's to hopin.

  • Hi,

    I only ever did theory on 3D computer graphics and it was some years ago so things I’m writing down are based on what I remember and what I could understand from the math of my slides .
    Too long won’t read : : because many light sources then ray tracing will take too much computational power. Go for path tracing and maybe add layers in your pipeline for better caustics with few iterations.

    I remember that ray tracing is good when you have little amount of light sources because it will iterate over each pixels and then send a ray to each light source. Above it’s mentioned that there are a lot of sources so ray tracing would take all the computational power of the world to converge.
    If you don’t want your card to overheat, and you have a lot of light sources then path tracing could be better? As far as I remember path tracing gives superb results with few iterations. You can even enhance it if you remove the randomness of it. Because basic path tracing takes some time to remove the noise, we implemented bi-directional path tracing and metropolis light transport(?) to be faster.

    I would assume in your case either variant of those methods yield better result. I googled and there’s this thing I never heard of called Energy Redistribution Path Tracing that seems appropriate to your problem since it’s an upgrade of the two methods above ?

    I assume Nvidia provide a SDK for all those methods.