C'mon, its 2020 and a lot of people have an RTX graphics card. It would be a cool idea to add an RTX graphics option, making ships look more realistic, new textures for islands and enemies, and ghost ships would be made spookier.
Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players
Seeing as the game seems set to continue being updated and actively supported for some time, you would have to expect that this is something on their road map. The new xbox is also capable of ray tracing, so you would hope that they would want to take advantage of that. Asthetics seems to have been important to the developers, so hopefully they can continue to advance along those lines.
I don't think there is really a point in implementing raytracing in this game. Generally you would use raytracing enhance lighting and reflective surfaces to look more realistic.
The only surface in the game that would benefit from this would be the water but the water in this game is designed to match the cartoony atmosphere of the characters and the world, so having realistic refracting water would look out of place.
@zakattakhere if you check the steam hardware surveys RTX graphics cards are still a very small minority for builds. heck the 1060 has 10.9% and all rtx card listed combine for 11.3%
Now I know a steam hardware surveys isn't the end all but its atleast a decent reference. im not sure an update for Raytracing is worth it for ~10% of the pc player base, which is even smaller when compared against the whole player base.
@d3adst1ck said in Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players:
I don't think there is really a point in implementing raytracing in this game. Generally you would use raytracing enhance lighting and reflective surfaces to look more realistic.
The only surface in the game that would benefit from this would be the water but the water in this game is designed to match the cartoony atmosphere of the characters and the world, so having realistic refracting water would look out of place.
While I would generally agree, it would be a waste of resources on water (not to mention it would probably have a significant impact on performance given the amount of reflections), RTX can be used for other graphical upgrades that stay within the aesthetic of the game. It's not just about reflections. For one, RTX does a far better job of contact shadows than AO can and it's really good at doing accurate shadow fall off from objects.
@realstyli said in Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players:
While I would generally agree, it would be a waste of resources on water (not to mention it would probably have a significant impact on performance given the amount of reflections), RTX can be used for other graphical upgrades that stay within the aesthetic of the game. It's not just about reflections. For one, RTX does a far better job of contact shadows than AO can and it's really good at doing accurate shadow fall off from objects.
That's true, but as with the water having excellent shadows won't really do much to enhance the game either since the game isn't particularly trying to be realistic looking.
Whenever a new technology comes out you'll invariably find nearly every game forum has threads suggesting that new tech should be added to that game but sometimes the new tech doesn't fit within the style of that game or that spending the time to add it wouldn't really provide much benefit. It's usually a waste of time and money by the development studio to try to back port it.
However, they can use it as a selling feature in the sequel when more cards support it and the API is more mature.
RTX is built in at a hardware level on the new Xbox consoles so it's going to be added to more and more games. I realise that not everyone has an RTX card on PC and that owning a 2070 Super I am in the minority but it's a tech that's going to grow and I wouldn't say it's not suited to this game.
I'm also not talking about shadows on water but on objects. It's something that Control showed off really well and I recommend checking out Digital Foundry's analysis of its implementation there to really get an idea of how transformative it can be in making objects look situated in the world. And it's not necessarily about realism but about believability. I'm not saying the game doesn't look stunning as it is, but I do think RTX can help in pushing it even further towards an almost CGI movie level of quality.
While I generally support the addition of RTX in games, where warranted, I would not want to do so if it would have a potentially negative impact on server performance. It sounds to me like that may be the case for SoT, so unless an expert says otherwise, I'm going to say no on this (for now, at least).
@galactic-geek Client graphics have zero to do with server performance. The only thing that would be impacted is if the client machine takes a big enough performance hit that it lags their computer/console enough to delay the client sending and receiving network packets, in which case that player would just be extremely laggy.
@d3adst1ck said in Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players:
@galactic-geek Client graphics have zero to do with server performance.
Traditionally I know this to be true, but I also know that SoT, in particular, offloads a lot onto the servers. That's often why so many pirates have issues with things like hit-reg.
@d3adst1ck said in Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players:
@galactic-geek Graphic rendering is never offloaded to the server.
If that were true, then why did I see Azure Cloud servers make a big deal with it while they showcased the graphics of Crackdown 3 and how much it could show on screen a few years ago prior to its release?
@galactic-geek said in Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players:
If that were true, then why did I see Azure Cloud servers make a big deal with it while they showcased the graphics of Crackdown 3 and how much it could show on screen a few years ago prior to its release?
If you are referring to what this article is talking about, they are offloading physics calculations to the server. The client still performs the rendering.
@d3adst1ck said in Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players:
@galactic-geek said in Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players:
If that were true, then why did I see Azure Cloud servers make a big deal with it while they showcased the graphics of Crackdown 3 and how much it could show on screen a few years ago prior to its release?
If you are referring to what this article is talking about, they are offloading physics calculations to the server. The client still performs the rendering.
Rendering doesn't involve physics? Okay...
@galactic-geek said in Suggestion: RTX graphics option for PC players:
Rendering doesn't take physics? Okay...
Rendering is just calculating which pixels are which colors on screen. It has nothing to do with physics.
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