This is why we need Raytracing native in ggm, or at least real time gi

FYI Max has a realtime dynamic global illumination system in place already, you may be referring to a better system like a cone based voxel global illumination system.

While raytracing is a new way of essentially rendering geometry and has been around since the 90's it wasn't adopted due to the hardware requirements being beyond the capabilities of what could be done at the time and still is for the majority of hardware, and to some extent to software.

Reasonable performance still has requirements of higher end hardware to get decent performance, and the hardware technology is still very much in it's infancy and compared to normal geometry rendering practices, preforms poorly on mid range, low end hardware when compared to normal rendering.

Vast majority of users do not have access to the required hardware, and this has been made worse by, crypto mining, the current war, memory chip shortages and research and developments which slowed down considerably in the last few years of die shrinkage fabrication issues. We are actually nearing the end of die shrinkage cycle, aka moore's law.

Technology hasn't quite caught up with ray tracing just yet and will be some time before the common folk is able to make use of the technology like it is making use of normal rendering practices.

However I will say, never underestimate the ingenuity of a developer, and it does ring true, to the untrained eye and even the most hardcore gamers will have a hardtime distinguishing a raytrace scene versus a normal rendered scene.

To proof the point, which one here is the ray traced scene, obviously one can use a reverse google search and cheat, but I implore you to guess here. The differences is quite subtle, to such an extent, I would say it isn't worth it in it's current state.

the image i sent was using ray traced global illumination, however i was suggesting Voxel Based GI because wicked supports it and very well at that. here is some before and after rtgi people that claim raytracing doesn't do anything or isn't noticeable just happen to not know enough

You missunderstand, NEVER said it doesn't do any thing, I SAID, the changes in most scene is going to be so subtle MOST people won't even notice it.

However the biggest problem, and why GAMEGURU max will NEVER see ray trace support NOW, and most likely never is the performance hit ray tracing has, unless you have an core i9 and a RTX3090 or AMD equivalent you aren't going to get good frame rates, mid range cards is barely playable and most of time other graphics fidelity settings has to be sacrificed in a lot of cases and in a lot on instances screen resolution also needs to be sacrificed.

Which kinda defeats the purpose of ray tracing, turning off features and lowering resolution can and will have a negative impact on the scene that is being rendered and as the result negates any impact ray tracing might present.

ray tracing doesn't have anything CLOSE to the performance of a normal rendered scene and WON'T have for some time and that is reason enough for gameguru max to stay far, far, far, far away from it, and sure you can have nice light reflections, refraction, and better sub surface light scattering.

However you can get all of those lighting effects by use of clever shaders( and have for some time before ray tracing became the new fad), but whether ray traced or normal rendering, still costs an arm and a leg to render regardless of the technology used, while gameguru max does use the wicked engine, it has been heavily modified to work with gamegruru max and a lot of things have been added to it that has considerable slowed down the engine in general, compared to the vanilla version of the engine.

Lastly there is almost ZERO impact from screenshots you have posted, other that the light being a bit brighter as if you have turned up the bloom in the scene.Ray tracing is about light reflection, refraction and scattering of light when it interacts with geometry. In other words the changes is so subtle in the scenes the frame rate penalty just isn't worth it.

Now for the unedited screenshot, framerate dropped considerably, ray tracing is best noticed on reflective surfaces it also lends some help in giving more depth, the light volume is also slightly better defined, but is it worth the unplayable frame rate. ?

Quick answer is no, it is of little use, no matter how flashy your graphics is, if the frame rate ends up being terrible.

Is the normal rendered scene so bad that it requires ray tracing, by no means I would not be impressed. Sadly you aren't shining a very good light on ray tracing with the screenshots posted( I know really bad pun). You seem to be obsessed with ray tracing in general, would much, much, much rather have a usable game engine before flashly graphics, would much rather have 100X times more geometry rendered in a scene before ray tracing, a playable, and engaging environment tops ANY flashy graphics ANY day of the week hands down.

Final thought, there is the old adage, no amount of flashy graphics will make up for a badly designed game.

once again saying there is no noticeable impact is just false and coming from a place of inexperience, AND a game like metro exodus enhanced is fully raytraced and runs for me on a 3060 at 1440p ultra settings at 100fps, bad implementations of raytracing do hurt performance, and while raytraced reflections are most noticeable they are not the most important or transformative and rtgi takes almost any indoor or outdoor scene into uncanny valley levels of photorealism when implemented correctly

using the rtgi mod i go from a locked 60 to a locked 60 and it doesn't use ANY hardware specific features just normal raster cores

Do you require a thesaurus, to look up the definition of the word subtle. Rasterization in general has gotten so good at faking it till you make it, that you won't easily be able to tell two scenes apart, shadow of the tomb raider is a very good example of this and sure there are other scenes that has visuals making it easier to tell apart. But advocating that we NEED ray tracing right now is, well completely absurd and unfounded, without taking LOTS of things into consideration.

Max has already set their system requirements in stone, changing system requirements mid way into a release isn't going to go down well with users that have the min system requirements and purchased max. The end, you will need to live with it, there is no buts here. The min supported GPU of 960GTX is supported by nvidia till 2024.

Ray tracing graphics cards is very much still in its infancy and while each new generation doubles the performance of the previous generation it is nowhere near the performance of rasterization and will take time, there is 3-4 odd commercial engines available that currently support ray tracing, there isn't many ray trace only games either, those games that do support ray tracing is always backward compatible and will be for the next few years as it still takes 3-5 years in general to develop a triple A game.

Due to crypto mining, war, chip and semiconductor shortages in general, adoption rates of ray tracing capable hardware is really slow and it is estimated that the market is more likely only able to stabilize in 2024 and beyond.

While you could theoretically manage two coded bases, for a small company like TGC it is impractical and will take time away from the main software to manage and develop some thing that a handful of people will be able to use, nor can you only focus on ray tracing as you will be shunning the majority of users with incompatible hardware, for a small company like TGC is a death sentence.

You need to appeal to the wider audience in the market.If you don't like the direction max is taking you either need to live with it, or perhaps find some thing that better suit your needs. TGC has a clear development path and they are sticking to it, lee has made it clear numerous times that they WON'T be changing anything on a whim and only do so when absolutely necessary.

A plugin mod is not the same thing as a integrated ray tracing system not by a long shot, there is certain aspects of mods especially RT reshade mod that can't alter certain aspects of the base code and engine. It is a post processing mod and is still limited in what it can do compared to a integrated system it is still reliant on rasterization and has its own limitations and pitfalls.

I mentioned that the screenshots you posted, doesn't do ray tracing any favors, adding a single light source a barrel and a building in no way represents real world conditions for ray tracing and frame rates. So pick one of the demo's, you can pick my demo level snow mountain stroll and use your mod and upload a video or show screenshots with the frame rate, if you don't now how to enable FPS send me a PM. Towards the end of that level is a bunker type setting with lots of lights which should give the mod a good work out. After which we can have a discussion about the merits of visuals versus performance.

While I would hazard a guess( could be wrong, who knows) you won't be getting anywhere close to a constant 60 FPS in real world conditions, the mod isn't an accurate representation of what frame rates will be like with an added ray tracing system to max either, after all it is a post processing mod and adds even more overhead. You constantly mention inexperience, why because I have a GTX 1660 ? you are aware in 2019 nvidia updated their drivers that enabled ray tracing for GTX cards ?. So I have no idea where you got that idea or why you seem to think it was needed to be mentioned in every post, in short been there, done that got the tshirt.


TLDR
Max won't be getting ray tracing , there is no point advocating for it as it won't happen.

We don't need raytracing in GGMax, imho.

no i was SHOWCASING rtgi but i would actually want voxel based gi implemented

I can create some thing similar or pretty close with max as it is right now. It doesn't really showcase any thing really. Really not trying to be mean or anything, if you going to showcase something it requires at least some effort to show it in the best light possible, the screenshots isn't doing a very good job of it.

A better lighting system isn't going to magically make things look better either, while you may be getting more accurate and better lighting it still requires underlying supporting visual processes and shading that work in conjunction with the lighting system in order to improve the scene. The performance hit isn't worth it either, if you have to take into account system requirements as well, you may have a capable system, but not everyone may be that lucky.

While on the subject of system requirements, many of the new graphics technologies are highly threaded and do require as much bus and ram bandwidth you can throw at it. There is still a lot of people using older systems with DDR3 ram and pci express 3 as an example, DDR4/DDR5 even pci express 4 doubles and in some cases triples the bandwidth available for use, this greatly impacts performance especially with some thing like ray tracing, which is extremely reliant on bandwidth and raw processing power.

pci express cards is backward compatible, using a 3080 in a pci express 3 slot as an example, can cut performance as much as 25% or more, with recent developments, pandemic, chip shortages, war ect ect, resulted in people sticking with older hardware for much longer now, on the other hand, people that can afford a 3080, have newer cpu's and ram.

There is more to just adding new technologies to max, it isn't complicated, just some thing that TGC is well aware of and needs to take careful consideration of developing max.

There is nothing wrong with ray tracing, it is the future, but it will take some time before the tech is really able to provide performance you currently get with normal rendering. I am all for it, just not the right time for it at the moment and it needs to mature and grow up some more in the hardware department.In another 4 or 5 generations, performance should theoretically be a moot point considering the current trend of doubling the performance of the RT cores, but do anticipate there will be some slow down on performance gains it won't be able to gain double the performance every generation eventually we will get the standard fair of 25%-30% performance increases we have seen with standard GPU cores, perhaps less.

Other than bragging rights, the technology isn't quite ready just yet and still pretty much relegated to higher end systems, we won't be seeing many ray tracing competitive multiplayer games any time soon, especially with regards to e-sport games, counter strike global offensive for example requires as much frames as you can get, lower frame rates can and will negatively impact the player it will be some time before any ray tracing titles realistically gets to the e-sport level.

It is definitely a nice to have.

https://github.com/TheGameCreators/GameGuruRepo/issues/3548

No time for ray tracing yet, I agree.
Anyway, you can get similar effects without it on GGMax, that's because I say it is unneeded in GGMax.

My 10p worth

1. There is hardly any notice between them

2. The frame rate cost is definitely not worth it

3. They don't even have a functioning world yet.
They have 2001 rain effect
Under water is fpsx 2002 aka fog
No weather system
No night and day
No inventory
Not integrated rpg or puzzle yet
Not added vr yet
Not sorted out the game engine properly
Not done thousands of things

So i think this request needs to go to the last on the list section

And I am absolutely fuming that builder editor is being worked on I am ready to kick off ( not that it will achieve anything) but they promised all this other stuff that again they blag off and then spend their time on something that was to be left alone I am absolutely angry about this they have sealed the final nail with that one for me

Are they all really working on the building editor? Oh my word !!!

No idea if they are, if they are good luck to them, if it is any thing like the last one, I still won't be using it.