Unity Ray Tracing vs. Path Tracing Comparisons

I test ray-tracing, path-tracing, & no ray-tracing in Unity to see the differences between the 3. All these were done using an Nvidia RTX graphics card on Unity 2021.2.16 and HDRP 12.1.6.
Assets used:
developer.nvidia.com/orca
docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com...
github.com/Unity-Technologies...
#shorts #unity

[@YourWaifu0]

In the newest version of Unity, they added a denoiser for path tracing. From my testing, this is a huge boost in performance, it now takes seconds for a clear frame, since you can get away with less samples and still get a clear image. I might make a video about it.

[@WesleyAusten]

How can I watch greater quality of video on mobile? All TH-cam shorts plays in 144p.😭

[@YourWaifu0]

the original video was 1748 by 2160, or 42.6% of 4K. This is the case because my computer couldn't handle rendering 2 4K videos side by side. But, here's the original (218 MB) : drive.google.com/file/d/1_aZK6wK_JvuViEht7BkeN2vEw8s31B22/view?usp=sharing

[@andyleung5504]

Love that but would prolly be better if you show it down since I can’t rewind the video I had to rewatch it over and over

[@samoerai6807]

Just watch the video here drive.google.com/file/d/1_aZK6wK_JvuViEht7BkeN2vEw8s31B22/view?usp=sharing

[@WeirdBrainGoo]

Or you could pause the video every now and then.

[@brodonamus]

you should be able to now on mobile

[@HoneyTwee]

Great video.

[@notarandom7]

They could add the god ray effect with path tracing, they just chose to disable it ig

[@ethergreen9348]

Would enjoy more stuff like this & will subscribe. However, too many images, text & voice for 42secs. Even if these are TikToks U have 18secs more. Good luck with your channel.

[@YourWaifu0]

Hey, 2 months old, but better late than never. This video was an experiment for a much longer video about the limitations of path tracing and why ray tracing is the way to go for now. With path tracing, a number of effects are missing and this makes sense, knowing the limitations of path tracing at real time. With ray tracing, some effects from both, path trace and screen space, are available to allow for the best of both. As for this video, I think it gets the point across, and it was meant to be looped so that you would take another look. The way shorts work encourages shorter videos, with 15 seconds being the length you want a short to be.

[@ralphpanganiban5577]

Ray Tracing isnt even easily accessible to most gamers 3 gens in and now this?

[@syeddanishanwer]

Don't worry. Path tracing is fake lighting with probabilistic algorithm, resulting in lots of noises. RT is a superior technology.

[@mememanfresh]

​@@syeddanishanwer is raytracing not fake lighting too?

[@YourWaifu0]

Both are fake lighting, real lighting are both particles and waves. Path tracing is done using ray tracing. However, I think they are confusing ray tracing with hybrids of rasterization with ray tracing. Both hybrids and path tracing are trying to simulate light bouncing to create effects of light that you can't get from just drawing triangles. Hybrids first render rasterization normally, and then trace rays starting from surfaces to other surfaces. Path tracing is tracing multiple rays per sample to create a path from the camera to a light source. Which is much closer to what happens in real lighting. The problems happen because each sample will be a different path because surfaces are rarely perfectly smooth, so the direction of the next ray goes from the surface and into a somewhat random direction. The randomness causes noise in the image, and as such, each pixel will need multiple samples to remove some of it. But, without a very high sample count in the thousands, there's going to be noise, and so there's usually a denoiser that solves that problem. The denoiser takes in each pixel and the texture of the surfaces, uses AI to guess the final image. As such with path tracing, it's more realistic. However, in my opinion that doesn't matter because what matters is which looks better and that depends on the hands of the artists and how they use these different techniques.

[@lightbox8019]

It’s been available since 2018 and is in the consoles. If you have old stuff you just have old stuff

[@Jjengering]

Its great... But it's basically unplayable for anybody on anything less than a 4090 or 4080.

[@lanchanoinguyen2914]

Path tracing is more accurate in simulating the real life.

[@YourWaifu0]

Right, but it still has issues with a number of things that happen in real life, like caustics or lighting though mediums like fog or dirty water. Not saying that it's not possible in ray tracing, but it has issues with it. It also doesn't help with physics simulations. Light carries momentum that can push things, or it can heat up objects, I don't see path tracing with GPUs handling these well right now. You can approximate those results with shaders and some scripts in Unity, like you see in games made in Unity today.

[@syeddanishanwer]

@@YourWaifu0 I agree. Path tracing images look inferior due to more noises as compared to ray tracing. RT does a much better job in displaying shadows and lighting.

[@YourWaifu0]

@@syeddanishanwer the noise problem can be overcome with better denoising. At GDC this year, I saw Nvidia show off some really impressive de-noising technology that uses multiple layers of normal maps and albedo maps to the handle noise in both reflections and transparency.

[@Archi._Vishal]

Path tracing In Twinmotion Is Always Best

[@ukaszl3197]

Rtx 4090 can do this easy ?

[@YourWaifu0]

I doubt it, unless it can somehow turn 30 seconds into 30 milliseconds. Portal RTX is the closest comparison, and the RTX 4090 can handle that. But, there's many optimizations that it's using that aren't available in Unity just yet. Optimization such as DLSS3, temporal and spatial resampling, and faster denoising.

[@Michael-go4ix]

There is a video of a 4090 on youtube running Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing and it only gets 18 fps avg lol not even the bare minimum 30 fps 😂