PC What if we had... 7 days of ray tracing?

[Syphel]

Okay okay, wait, hear me out. 

FIRSTLY, I'm not saying we NEED ray tracing nor would it be a realistic thought to ever have it in the game. I'm not requesting it either.

I'm making this question because I'm curious how difficult would be to implement such a feature into a voxel game like 7 days to die. 
Would ray tracing be even possible to add theoretically speaking?

But it would be kinda interesting and suit the game in a way because of how important low ambient light environments are to the immersion. I have personally found myself completely blinded by the darkness when going to a building without a torch. 

 

[Rotor]

/gamma up clicky

 

[Syphel]

/gamma up clicky

No need for it, I love the fact that it's pitch darkness because torches and light sources become an actual important piece of gear and base setup. 

 

[Rotor]

No need for it, I love the fact that it's pitch darkness because torches and light sources become an actual important piece of gear and base setup. 

I mean, I was being a general purpose smartderrier, but I thought that was your need for ray tracing ???  Guess I misunderstood.

 

[Ripflex]

I mean the game already runs badly with BASIC rasterization, I doubt they know how to do ray tracing.

 

[Fox]

It's not a matter of if it can be implemented, but if it can even be played at all with it enabled. I'm sure you've seen Minecraft with Ray Tracing. Minecraft by itself can run on a potato office computer no problem at all, but the moment you add Ray Tracing, you suddenly need an RTX 2080 or better just to have playable FPS. Now imagine 7D2D which struggles to get 60+ fps (max settings) on most gaming computers with an RTX 2080 or better, now add Ray Tracing. Requirements would be at minimum RTX 6080 or better, especially since Nvidia stopped focusing on gaming related tech and are now into AI nonsense.

 

[Riamus]

Well, you would need an RTX 2060 or better anyhow, just to support ray tracing.  That in itself is a reason why they wouldn't consider it.  They want to support weaker/older hardware and I have a feeling a decent percent of players use graphics cards that don't support ray tracing, so they'd be putting in a lot of effort for only part of their player base.  Now, for their next game, they may focus on better hardware for minimum specs and then adding ray tracing would be something they might consider.

There is also the question of how they might implement it in the game.  For example, I believe it is Metro Exodus that made an enhanced version of whatever it was called that supported ray tracing, among all the other improvements.  Yet you can't even open the game if you don't have a graphics card that supports ray tracing.  It isn't even an option to disable it so you can play the enhanced version.  Other games do have it as an option.  I don't know why it was not an option in Metro Exodus and maybe they just didn't want to support older hardware in that version, but if it was due to some difficulty in making the game support enabling and disabling ray tracing, then that would also be a consideration if TFP wants to support older hardware.

 

[Syphel]

 Now imagine 7D2D which struggles to get 60+ fps (max settings) on most gaming computers with an RTX 2080 or better, now add Ray Tracing. 

I'm under the impression that the game isn't struggling because of having indecent graphics cards, but because of CPU optimizations for such a huge scale game. 
For example, I'm running RTX 3090 Ti and at 1440p, my game runs at 100+ fps at max on average (including any big dips). While the GPU itself is being used at around 60%. 

It's kinda like having a massive mob farm in minecraft and once close to it and looking at it, you'll have your FPS consumed heavily compared to when being away from that. I see that it's gotten better over a number of alpha releases.  
 

There is also the question of how they might implement it in the game. 

You're right, implementation would be a huge player, but I bet they would make it a selectable option rather than going the Metro Exodus way. 

 

[warmer]

The game would need to change it's name from 7D2D to 7FPS

 

[Maharin]

The game would need to change it's name from 7D2D to 7FPS

Or possibly 7SPF...

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

I mean the game already runs badly with BASIC rasterization, I doubt they know how to do ray tracing.

Nearly all FPS drops and lags are due to the CPU. Like downtown near skyscrapers. Or a lot of Z´s at once. High-may settings basically never hit my GPU hard and it´s a RX6600XT

Still don´t see any reason to add raytracing.

 

[Syphel]

Nearly all FPS drops and lags are due to the CPU. Like downtown near skyscrapers. Or a lot of Z´s at once. High-may settings basically never hit my GPU hard and it´s a RX6600XT

Agreed. As I've been playing random gen and got to a city with skyscrapers, it goes from 120FPS down to 25FPS. It is quite extreme difference. 
So I had a chance to experiment with it. 

I went through all the settings from low or ultra quality and found that object quality which I believe is responsible for how far the objects get rendered. And that ups my performance greatly. So the less HQ objects to render, the more performance basically. So having something like occlusion seems like the obvious next step.

I saw that in A22 diary they are adding this: "A new window tinting system makes window glass opaque until you get close."
So I'm waiting a lot for this, if it manages to improve skyscraper performance. 
I do wonder, if they can add something like block occlusion which occludes all things behind blocks. 

 

[Arez]

I would like to see Ray Tracing in this game.

I only tried playing one game with Ray Tracing on and that was Resident Evil 2 Remake. I was getting 300+fps with it on. I thought it wasn't working, and it didn't even look all that impressive. I shut it off and everything just looked bad. It wasn't so much that the lighting changed. Things just looked degraded. 

Who knows what Capcom was doing.

I gotta say though, the lighting and reflections in 7 Days is really good as is. I know Ray Tracing is more than just that. But with the way the game's lighting is now, I don't really feel like I'm missing anything...but it would be interesting to see.

 

[Fox]

I would like to see Ray Tracing in this game.

Careful what you wish for.

 

[Arez]

Careful what you wish for.

What...they might implement it resulting in horrible performance and it could simply be shut off like it can in every single game that has it?

Zombie Dr. House. Big fan!

 

[Scyris]

Considering the base game still runs like crap even on a Geforce RTX 4090 at times, I highly doubt raytracing is going to be a good idea. They need to get the base game to run well first before remotely considering something like Raytracing. Besides 7dtd already looks way to good for what it is already, the games graphics is one thing I can't complain about as the game looks good honestly. I just wish they'd focus on making the gameplay better instead of just improving the visuals each alpha. Gameplay had gone downhill since a16.4, while the graphics have gotten better each alpha.

 

[SylenThunder]

Considering the base game still runs like crap even on a Geforce RTX 4090 at times, I highly doubt raytracing is going to be a good idea. They need to get the base game to run well first before remotely considering something like Raytracing. Besides 7dtd already looks way to good for what it is already, the games graphics is one thing I can't complain about as the game looks good honestly. I just wish they'd focus on making the gameplay better instead of just improving the visuals each alpha. Gameplay had gone downhill since a16.4, while the graphics have gotten better each alpha.

The base game doesn't give a @%$# about your 4090. It is CPU-bound, and can be easily hindered by other software. You would be aware of this if you did any research.

 

[Riamus]

I just wish they'd focus on making the gameplay better instead of just improving the visuals each alpha. Gameplay had gone downhill since a16.4, while the graphics have gotten better each alpha.

Considering they are working on finishing the game for gold, you are going to be disappointed because they aren't going to be doing much with gameplay other than adding bandits/story.  Everything else is going to be optimizations and improved art/UI/etc. as well as more POI for the remaining alphas.

 

[Pernicious]

I mean the game already runs badly with BASIC rasterization, I doubt they know how to do ray tracing.

Late to this thread, but I thought it would be worth bringing up some technical details to combat misconceptions like this.

Ray Tracing is not "more complex" than rasterisation plus shading. They are two different methods to turn a 3D model into a 2D image. It is true that there is more maths involved in ray tracing, but that's only relevant if you are executing them on a general purpose chip like a CPU.  Saying you can't do basic rasterization well means that you can't do ray tracing well is like saying "He's a slow pushbike cyclist, so he's going to be a terrible motorcycle rider". They both have the same outcome (getting some place), but the equipment used and skills involved are unrelated.

What makes it more complex is that GPU hardware isn't just one single figure for performance. a 4090 has CUDA cores, RT Cores, and Tensor Cores, and each core type has been specialized and optimised to do a different type of maths. Ray tracing doesn't use more of the same core - they use part of the CUDA cores, and utilise RT cores that rasterisation won't use. So it's entirely possible that under the right circumstances, turning on ray tracing doesn't result in a drop in FPS at all. It's also possible in the future, that Nvidia decide to reduce die space for CUDA cores in order to include more RT and Tensor cores, as this is where they believe the market is heading. It's only because of a design decision by Nvidia that makes it a general rule that ray tracing is slower than rasterisation (Since ray tracing wasn't supported in a huge number of games when it came out, imagine the reviews if Nvidia had decided to cut the number of CUDA cores to get more die space for more RT Cores - "New 2080 slower in most games than 1080 and more expensive!")

The GPU as a whole also has to wait for the CPU to feed it information. As people have pointed out, it's the CPU that is the main bottleneck for 7D2D. It's not impossible (although unlikely) that switching to ray tracing could improve performance. If the RT cores takes load off the CPU as compared to rasterisation techniques, this could possibly be an unusual case.

Anyway... Probably more detail than most people ever wanted. Go easy on the devs. It's getting harder and harder to be an informed enthusiast these days with the complexity of systems, which is totally fine. You don't need to be an expert to have an opinion. But when criticising people, it's a courtesy to understand before criticising.