Tag Archives: Nvidia RTX

Technology

Stunning Unreal Engine 5 3D Video May As Well Be Real Life

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The video you’re about to see is not camera footage of the Etchū-Daimon train station in Japan. It is a video made by 3D artist Lorenzo Drago.

Created in Unreal Engine 5, with lighting from Lumen, Drago says he did “all modeling, texturing, lighting and animation” in the clip, with the exception of the foliage you see briefly, which came from Quixel Megascans. That means he built almost everything himself. The steps, the walls, the lights, the cables, the works, with some textures made by hand and others from photos.

“For this project, I wanted to get as close to photorealism as possible”, he says. “I used camera matching to get accurate proportions and made careful use of reference. I adjusted the measurements afterwards to help with modularity.”

“Aside from detail textures and alphas created from photographs, I created all textures from scratch in Painter and made custom materials in Unreal for use with vertex painting or masks to break up repetition.”

While the quality of the space itself is incredible—and took around a month to complete—what helps make the whole thing look and feel real is the way the camera is used. “To shoot the video”, Drago says, “I used real-time VR tracking to emulate a handheld camera and flashlight.”

See? Just…wow. This is the part where I must remind you that this video was crafted meticulously just for this footage, and so we can’t and shouldn’t be expecting this level of fidelity in our actual games any time soon. But still. 

Let’s end with some trivia. Firstly, this video wasn’t captured in real-time. Drago says it can be done, but that “image quality is worse”, so this is instead a high-res render captured at 7fps. And if you were wondering, he did it on an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with an RTX 2080.

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Technology

Original Doom On PC Now Has Raytracing Via New Mod

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Okay, before we begin, you won’t be able to play this version of Doom on a pregnancy test or cash register. But whatever, the original Doom with ray tracing is so cool that I can forgive that one drawback.

Announced yesterday on April Fools’ Day, this new visual mod for the original 1993 release of Doom ain’t a joke. Created by modder sultim-t, this mod adds real-time path tracing to the PrBoom source port of Doom. It currently supports the first three episodes of the classic shooter and dramatically changes the way Doom looks, letting you play the old-timer with incredible, modern lighting.

Installing this new ray tracing mod for Doom is fairly simple. You’ll need an original Doom.wad file to run this, which considering how old and cheap the game is, you likely already have one kicking around somewhere on your computer. Then you just download the mod for PrBoom, a modern Doom source port and you are off the races. Or should I say… RAY-ces. (I shouldn’t. I’m very sorry that I did.)

Sultim-t explains on the mod’s download page that this only works for Nvidia GPUs and they are willing to help someone get this working on Linux.

This ain’t the first time we’ve seen a classic Id shooter get the raytracing treatment. In 2019, Nvidia partnered with Id to create Quake II RTX, a version of the classic shooter that also utilized real-time ray tracing tech.

I really enjoy the way Doom and Quake look with fancy real-time lighting. The simple textures and geometry of these classic shooters still hold up in 2022, but now the improved lighting is able to improve the atmosphere of these old-school digital worlds. Doom in particular can look downright scary at times using this new mod.

Of course, as mentioned already, you’ll need a decently powerful PC to run these games with ray tracing enabled as this tech is very resource-demanding and needs modern, fairly high-end GPUs to even work at all.

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Technology

Nvidia RTX PC GPUs Come Down In Price As Bitcoin, Dogecoin Fall

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Image: EVGA / Kotaku

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card you’ve been after to complete your “Extreme Gaming PC” build is still in short supply but finally getting slightly cheaper. That’s thanks to a drop in crypto mining participation as the value of Bitcoin and other blockchain currencies plummet ahead of what some analysts are calling a new “crypto winter.” Sounds bad for the server farms cooking the planet for short-term gains, but good for anyone looking to play Starfield on ultra settings later this year.

As CNBC reported yesterday, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both down nearly 50% from their peaks just a few months ago. Whether you think it’s just a cooling-off period, a long-overdue market correction, or a “death cross” omen of bad days ahead for crypto, the shift is already manifesting as modest price movement in the supply-constrained world of PC gaming.

Tom’s Hardware recently did a quick survey of graphics card reseller prices on eBay, and found that the prices of most popular models have started to come down from their peak a month ago. In a few cases, the prices have even dropped by double digits. A 4.5 percent discount on a RTX 3080 Ti might not sound like a lot, but given how expensive the cards are to begin with it comes out to be nearly $100 cheaper than it was just a month ago. RTX 3080 10GB cards apparently saw an even more impressive drop, dropping from $1,804 down to $1,595.

While Nvidia GPU supplies are supposed to improve in the second half of 2022, Intel said last fall that overall shortages, and thus inflated prices, could continue well into 2023. Outsized demand, meanwhile, has been driven in part by recent booms in the crypto mining market. At the same time GPUs became scarcer during the pandemic, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and other assets reached unprecedented new heights, leading to windfalls for those with the computing capacity to service the blockchain.

But at least on the crypto -side, the tide finally seems to be turning in favor of cheaper graphics cards. Things started moving in that direction last month after Fed Chair Jerome Powell teased interest rate hikes. In addition to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, meme stocks like GameStop and AMC are also crumbling. Hopefully, more affordable PC gaming doesn’t end up coming at the cost of another economic recession.

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Technology

Genshin Impact Devs Awarded PS5s, Graphics Cards Via RNG

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Raffles and gift give-aways aren’t uncommon at company parties, but the company behind Genshin Impact went a step further, randomly awarding hard-to-get graphics cards and PS5s to employees as thanks for helping make one of last year’s hottest new free-to-play gacha games.

“MiHoYo, the developers of Genshin Impact, held their annual employee meeting where they gave away a bunch of electronics to employees in a lottery,” Niko Partners senior data analyst, Daniel Ahmad, wrote on Twitter yesterday. Accompanying photos showed giant stacks of iPhones, Nintendo Switches, GeForce RTX graphics cards, and PlayStation 5s, the latter of which has been especially hard for people to get their hands on following ongoing inventory shortages.

The irony, of course, as PC Gamer pointed out, is that Genshin Impact is itself largely based around lotteries—based on random number generators (RNG)—in which players pay currency earned in-game or real money for a chance to unlock rare new characters. Some are much harder to get than others, leading players to grind and burn through resources waiting for top-tier characters like Venti to drop. Some players have spent loads of money on the game this way, one of the reasons Genshin Impact went on to make nearly $400 million in its first couple of months, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower.

To celebrate the game’s lucrative launch, MiHoYo reportedly used a similar drop-rate system to allocate the limited supply of gaming hardware it planned to give away to employees on top of other bonuses. According to a screenshot shared by Ahmad, staff had a 30% shot at a Nintendo Switch, a 21% shot at an RTX 3070 graphics card, a 16% shot at a PS5, and a 1% chance of getting a combined Apple Watch Series 6 and iPhone 12 Pro Max bundle.

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For the time being, it looks like you’ve got at least as good a chance of scoring a PS5 from getting a job working on Genshin Impact as you do from refreshing your Amazon cart.



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