Full path tracing option in the future or after 1.0?

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darkbasic
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Re: Full path tracing option in the future or after 1.0?

Post by darkbasic »

psi29a wrote: 04 Apr 2021, 15:33Your initial FPS is going to tank
Would it be so worse than for example uncached shaders compilation? I'm not talking about OpenMW which has simple shaders but something like AAA games.
psi29a wrote: 04 Apr 2021, 15:33especially so if you're unlucky and your OS schedules that thread on the same core that the draw thread is on.
Is it not possible to hint the scheduler? Otherwise anything HT would always trash latency sensitive workloads.
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psi29a
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Re: Full path tracing option in the future or after 1.0?

Post by psi29a »

If CyperPunk2077 suffers from the same issues as we do, what makes you think we can do better? ;)

What we did recently with navmesh is to set that thread to a lower priority which should help the OS in scheduling.

Funny thing, CP2077 with their 1.2 patch ended up doing the same thing with the streaming thread, lowering its priority s well which helped on PS4 Pro in bumping FPS, but meaning that meshes/textures are slower at loading... so when you zoom by in your car, objects will just fail to load because they didn't have enough time too.
Sagacity
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Re: Full path tracing option in the future or after 1.0?

Post by Sagacity »

The closest thing you'd likely get to this is the implementation of every significant lighting step as a raytracing stand-in optionally. This would allow someone to theoretically turn on all raytracing features and have a more-or-less pathtraced game. The big issues are really as follows;
  1. Morrowind is horribly unoptimized, and OpenMW is already doing a ton to mitigate this.
  2. Path tracing does not actually look that much better than selectively applied ray tracing or just rasterization and it's various tricks.
  3. Currently, most of Morrowind's assets just don't work well for something like this. The highest fidelity stuff Morrowind has in vanilla is bumpmapping and glowmapping. This pales in comparison to PBR textures, and the variety of associated textures. As a comparison, in vanilla morrowind, you have diffuse, bump, glowmap, and maybe a specialty map. PBR maps are usually containing all of the following: Albedo, Roughness, Metalness, Fresnel, AO. And can contain some more such as, Porosity, Emmissive, Subsurface Scattering, and Puddle Maps
  4. Raytracing acceleration requires Vulkan or DX12, neither of which are currently supported on OpenMW. A migration to VulkanSceneGraph may happen, but almost certainly long after 1.0
  5. There really just isn't a ton of desire for it from the people who actually contribute code.
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