PC Ray Tracing in 7 Days to Die

[Grimsh]

Hey, i just back while ago to your game and i noticed a fancy thing (did i miss something in changelogs?) your game in terms of glass reflection ( a bit laggy but still) or tracing light path during day cycle or player source of light act as same as minecraft RTX version on windows 10. Did you implement this as future feature or ?

 

[Fox]

I very much doubt that Ray Tracing will ever be implemented into this game. This game is already a serious pig on resources without having to triple that consumption with RT.

 

[SylenThunder]

What exactly to you expect Ray Tracing to add to the game?   I mean if you want to use Minecraft as a comparison, lets put these guys into the automotive arena. Minecraft would have about the same fuel and power requirements as a moped in comparison to 7 Days which would be running more akin to something like an 18-wheeler.

If a feature like this were even to be considered, it would likely be post-launch. (Assuming it won't melt your system in the process.)

 

[Grimsh]

Its not like ask to add it, i just noticed that some reflection mechanic (glass for sure) and light in many terms act exactly like minecraft RTX version, so i was curious if it was done for purpose.

 

[Boidster]

OP was misunderstood, I think. He is complimenting 7D2D on its light/surface interaction and 'god rays' even without true raytracing.

The answer to the general question is, I think, that TFP have made numerous improvements to the graphics in the last couple of alphas, but not actual raytracing like MC RTX. Shadows especially, in my opinion, work very well in A18. I was walking around town at low sunset and noticed a shadow moving nearby and turned, expecting to see a zombie. Nope, it was my co-op partner moving around up on our base rooftop like 50-100 blocks away. It was a neat effect.

 

[NDPurvis]

Now, after the release of the new Geforce RTX 3000 series GPU’s, the newly found graphics power people will be adding to their computers makes adding Ray Tracing to 7D2D more feasible. In fact, I’m sure TFP’s are already considering implementing it in future alphas right now. If they don’t keep up as best they can with the latest graphics technology, the game will fall behind and quickly become old, even before they go gold. Ray Tracing will become a standard feature in all future games, with the ability to toggle on & off, of course.

I’d expect to see it added to 7D2D within the next couple of years. At least, I hope so.

 

[Vanetooth]

I doubt it, for me and most of my friends the problem with 7 days isn't our gpu's power, but our CPU's. Pretty sure that my cpu is bottlenecking my gpu, but I really only experience this problem in 7 days. Plus a good cpu can cost as much if not more than a good GPU. When I play 7 days my gpu runs at 50-60% whereas my cpu is at 90-100%.
CPU: Ryzen 5 2600X Six-Core at 3.80GHz
GPU: RTX 2060 Super.

I primarily play the game on medium, just because I like to stream it and it's to cpu intensive, anything above medium and I always get the same framerate while stationary, which is about 50fps(even with the textures on ultra+). It's when zombies come into sight then my cpu hits the ceiling and my pc starts crapping itself. Just my experiences, I would like to better tune my pc to run the game on higher graphics, because man can this game look good, but I can't get 60 fps on anything above medium and streaming the game on medium still drops frames when hordes show up

 

[Fox]

lol, keep dreaming.

 

[ElCabong]

My GTX 970 is getting so old... Normally they break after 2 years and I get excited when they do. Darn I've got to upgrade, lol.

This one's been a champ.  4 years

 

[BruiseSwayne]

I agree with the OP.  I was impressed when I saw a reflection of another player behind me in the scope of my rifle.

Isn't RT still only in preview with Unity?  I would expect TFP wouldn't bother until after it was a natural upgrade for the platform.

MC RT started as a mod.  It would be great to see that happen here as well if it was possible so TFP could focus on improvements that apply to a larger audience.

 

[meganoth]

I think someone should clarify a misconception here: There are tricks and there is RT.

A trick is to just render a picture of what is behind you shrinked on the glass of your scope. This is doable on any graphics card without tracing a single light ray.

This is similar to the tricks used to do all reflections in the game. If you have reflections turned on, any old graphics card can show you the sun reflected on water. It would even be possible in a game to have waves show a ripple effect if you keep the waves regular.

The difference to RT is, with RT waves would show the ripple effect even on irregular waves, for example if you threw a stone into the water. For this reason RT is a step up but isn't the revolution some people might think it is, because with tricks a lot of stuff is already possible in traditional graphics

How do I know that 7D2D does not use RT? Well, because I think I have seen the reflection in scopes as well with an AMD RX580 and definitely no RT included.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a graphics expert, lots of hearsay in this)

 

[Crater Creator]

I think someone should clarify a misconception here: There are tricks and there is RT.

A trick is to just render a picture of what is behind you shrinked on the glass of your scope. This is doable on any graphics card without tracing a single light ray.

This is similar to the tricks used to do all reflections in the game. If you have reflections turned on, any old graphics card can show you the sun reflected on water. It would even be possible in a game to have waves show a ripple effect if you keep the waves regular.

The difference to RT is, with RT waves would show the ripple effect even on irregular waves, for example if you threw a stone into the water. For this reason RT is a step up but isn't the revolution some people might think it is, because with tricks a lot of stuff is already possible in traditional graphics

How do I know that 7D2D does not use RT? Well, because I think I have seen the reflection in scopes as well with an AMD RX580 and definitely no RT included.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a graphics expert, lots of hearsay in this)

Quite right.  Reflections ≠ raytracing.  We've had tricks to look like realtime 3D reflections for 20+ years, before people even had graphics cards.

The earliest case I can think of was Duke Nukem 3D, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was an earlier one.  The trick there was to have an impassable window looking into a room with identical, mirrored geometry to the room you're in (and then draw a copy of the character).

That doesn't work for 7DtD, since with few exceptions we expect nothing to be impassable.

A later trick is to choose a location in the scene, render out the scene in all directions from that point, as if with a 360°  camera, and use the result as a reflection map for your shiny surfaces.  One game that stood out to me for doing this was Portal, with its many polished hydraulic cylinders.

But these were a little off as I recall, mostly because the reflection maps were precomputed files.  They couldn't update when something in the scene changed, which would be bad for 7DtD where entire buildings can appear or disappear over time.

What 7DtD seems to actually have is realtime reflection mapping for a select number of materials.  I believe whenever a surface is reflective, it effectively means rendering the scene more than once: one rasterization pass for surfaces seen by the camera, and another for surfaces seen in the reflection.



The performance overhead for doing these multiple renders is kept in check by limiting the resolution of the reflection map (affected by the reflections quality setting) and how often it updates (as you play, you can see reflections update a few times a second, while the main scene renders at 60 FPS or whatever your framerate is).

I think the OP saw materials like the one shown in this screenshot (black TV screen) and concluded that the game had ray tracing.

I'm surprised that players are given the ability to paint as many reflective surfaces as they want.  The game could likely enjoy certain optimizations if reflectivity was only used strategically.  For instance, a big multi-block mirror could be treated as a single rectangular surface that needs reflections.  But since you could just as easily paint that reflective material onto some funky irregular shape with a zillion polygons, the engine probably computes reflections block by block.

That gets at one of the advantages of actual ray tracing: why it would be revolutionary in some ways.  It's been some time since I was looking into this in detail, and I may have missed some advancements, but render time in ray tracing increases logarithmically with scene complexity, instead of linearly with rasterization.

Because the HW has no knowledge about the scene it must process every triangle [in rasterization] leading to a linear complexity with respect to scene size: Twice the number of triangles leads to twice the rendering time. While here are options to optimize this, must be done in the application separate from the HW.

The other algorithm – ray tracing – works in fundamentally different ways. It starts by shooting rays for each pixel into the scenes and uses advanced spatial indexes (aka. acceleration structures) to quickly locate the geometric primitive that is being hit. Because these indexes are hierarchical they allow for a logarithmic complexity: Above something like 1 million triangles the rendering time hardly changes any more.

Source: https://my.eng.utah.edu/~cs6965/papers/a1-slusallek.pdf