Ray tracing update?

[Angus]

I'm hoping we get a ray tracing update like WoW. Yoshida made a comment on the FFXVI website saying "Our next big information reveal is scheduled for 2021, so in the meantime, I expect everyone to have fun speculating, as we have a lot in store—not only for the newest entry in the series, FINAL FANTASY XVI, but for FINAL FANTASY XIV, too. Needless to say, I’ll be working hard on both!"
https://na.finalfantasyxvi.com/
Now this could be an announcement for 6.0 or even a crossover event, but I feel SE needs to add a like graphics bump for FFXIV.

[Noctisnine]

Not gonna happen.

[DPZ2]

I can almost guarantee you that a graphics bump for FFXIV will not occur until a majority of systems (Sony and Microsoft 10-based hardware) have graphics cards that support Ray Tracing.

Shadowlands requires (1) specific NVIDIA card drivers (2) May 2020 update for Windows 10 (3) Direct X 12 and, most importantly, (4) a GPU that supports DirectX Ray Tracing Tier 1.1.

My PC has 3 of the 4, and I am not going out and blowing $350 for yet-another-video-card that supports (4).

Items (1), (2), (3) and (4) aren't even available on the console side at this time.

[Shougun]

The crystal areas in this game with ray tracing would be insane. . . . 0_0




Game isn't ugly but I wouldn't say it has the best graphics anymore either. Of course it's not first priority to enjoy the game but it would be cool to get an optional graphics update of some sort.

[DPZ2]

Just want to add that if SE decides to join the Ray Tracing Revolution -- more power to them!

Right now, in WoW, it's a gimmick.

[Packetdancer]

*hums a chipper little tune* o/` Quotin' myself from another thread... o/`

I actually suspect that if we see it, we'll see support for it when the native PS5 version comes out; it would be a sensible path for actual development cost reasons.

Right now, as best I can tell, they have to maintain two rendering pipelines: DX11 for PC, and GNMX for PS4 (or possibly GNM if they're writing down to the bare metal, but I suspect they're not). The Mac build uses the DX11 renderer, translated into Vulkan via DXVK and from Vulkan to Metal via MoltenVK.

I'm fairly sure that the PS5 has a GNMX translation layer that can handle software written to the GNMX API, if only because of their backwards compatibility. However, it would not surprise me if that turns out to be a legacy layer that translates into Vulkan under the hood, thus meaning it would be more effective to just write for Vulkan in the first place.

Because it's worth noting that the PS5 and Xbox One Series X both support Vulkan natively. Windows 10 has surprisingly decent Vulkan support. And while macOS doesn't have native Vulkan support, MoltenVK works quite well to translate to Metal. Moreover, as of this past March, Vulkan finished their ray tracing extension; given the long lead time before the extensions were formally released, that's more than enough time for the PS5 (and new Xbox) to support the ray tracing extensions natively.

So if they want to take advantage of PS5 features—much less if they want to also have an XBox version someday—it would make sense to write a native Vulkan renderer to replace the DX11 one. That way, they'd only have one rendering pipeline shared across every platform; that's more of an up-front investment, yes, but in the long run is a lot less code to maintain. And putting together something that runs on macOS—whether natively on Metal, or Vulkan atop MetalVK—will be a crucial step if they want a native macOS client. Which itself is likely to become a necessity as Apple moves to ARM-based silicon instead of Intel chips. (Unless they just end-of-life macOS support.)

So switching to Vulkan, which is the one thing that'll run literally everywhere they might want to be? It would be the rational choice.

And if you're going to change the lighting system to support ray-tracing, doing it when you're forced to rewrite the rendering pipeline to support new platforms anyway—especially if you're targeting an API that has a standardized extension for raytracing—would probably be the time to do it.

[SannaR]

I'd rather get more character customization before a graphics upgrade. Though who knows what will happen after they decide to drop ps4 support.

[Kewitt]

I will Wait for the next gen MMO from SE. Or 7.0 and sadly it would be only 7.0 areas. till 8.0 That assuming they drop PS4 support in 7.0

It's kind of amazing to think some people will have been playing this game from ps3 to ps5!! 3 generations on one game.

I would even take a toggle for /gpose only Ray Tracing.

[Limecat]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMYgcS53Ezk

[Endeleon]

Yeah, no thanks. Gimme more faces first.