DX12 was definitely unreliable in Unity 5.5, but it feels stable (at least in my experience) in Unity 2018.1. Which version of Unity are you seeing DX12 issue? What specific DX12 issues are you seeing?
Does not work for me in 2018.2.3, maybe it’s single pass and VR that creates the problems though.
From a game quality and performance perspective, what benefits would RTX have, for instance, this article breaks down the performance trade-off of quality settings in PUBG (https://www.pcgamer.com/best-pubg-settings/).
Setting - Performance Impact - Low to Ultra
Effects - 25% (explosions and particles)
Shadows - 16%
Post-processing - 15%
Foliage - 2%
Motion Blur - 2%
Anti-aliasing - negligible
DLSS would be classed as Anti-aliasing so makes very little difference in this case.
Possibly the biggest impact for RTX would be in shadows and maybe post-processing for reflections, focus effects, god rays or ambient occlusion.
The thing is do we have a very high spec Unity game or Demo where we can benchmark the various quality settings that will be most impacted by RTX?
Book of the Dead
All of this speculation is meaningless for a few reasons:
- We don’t know anything about the RTX chart aside from the vague implication of “faster.”
- Because of the substantial changes to how the RTX cards work, we can’t really use prior benchmarks as a frame of reference.
- Many of the RTX tech gains haven’t had relevant benchmarks shown at all.
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As I understood RTX actually helps artists to get reatime vis and GI of the scene without baking or building lights.
For example, Unity dev said that Book of the dead demo is not build for day and night cycle. So RTX could help around this problem if integrated in Unity.
Too bad is not affordable card for small developers.
Is there any EXE of this yet? or is the youtube teaser the only thing that came out of all this hype?
Yes, I know there is the environment project. But I was expecting the actual full demo to go out one day.
It was supposed to be an actual interactive demo and the youtube video just a teaser.
It’s been months from that announcement and the demo is nowhere to be found.
It’s just a way of thinking about the potential of RTX as a way to displace GPU heavier tasks into raytracing hardware and therefore boosting the performance of games.
What will be interesting will be RTX benchmarks on existing games and then the first games that make use of RTX vs none RTX features.
I was hoping that we would have Unity Quality and performance benchmarks comparable to the PUBG breakdown of each Quality setting and its impact on performance.
I was hoping any Unity communication on the matter.
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That is it. It might not be good enough for you but at least the media is licensed for use in your own games, and it demonstrates pretty much the same workload. What would be missing is an animated arm and the default character controller (which was also pretty crappy frankly, in the recorded demo).
In other news, Unity is hard at work on a brand new open character controller and animation system, so hopefully you could be satisfied by the right to use the media + wait a little bit for a really, really good character controller?
… all free of charge, of course.
I suppose you are talking about my comment on Book of the Dead. (correct me if I wrong)
I was simply saying Unity talked a lot about a super-hyped demo that never came out in the end and there is no official news on the matter. It would be as simple as saying: “it’s not coming out”.
Also, it’s very nice to have all this high quality content free to use. Those things are always appreciated.
But sadly the shaders aren’t Unity’s standard, continuing the trend of making custom systems and shaders in demos for very specific scenarios instead of expanding the engine and integrating those developments in the core (managing compatibility and surface shader support for this)
This gives the false impression that standard Unity vegetation and terrains use this advanced technology, when they are in fact add-ons with limited compatibility, even if they are free.
That is indeed good news, even If I’m quite satisfied with Mecanim actually.
But please, don’t interpret what I’m saying with being “unsatisfied” with Unity: I LOVE UNITY.
Unity is at the core of my work. I would hate to switch to another engine.
It’s just that Unity (the company) seems to be progressively turning into Autodesk or Microsoft with all this corporate speech and tricks.
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Ah but there is more to this. Book of the Dead is essentially a work in progress. The engine that powers it is HDRP, and that’s very much work in progress. When the video was made there were no volumetrics, so they repurposed the blacksmith solution. Now there is a full volumetric system in HDRP, so that fixes some of the things they couldn’t bring you properly.
The next problem is the terrain. The terrain in book of the dead is just a basic unity one and there’s no special tech there in BOTD for it, so essentially that’s WIP as well. As far as I guess the new terrain tooling comes in 2018.3 and 2019.1 but these versions are pure guesses on my part. I do know the terrain is coming along well so I can confirm it it’s going to be cool.
Book of the Dead was really showcasing HDRP, nothing else. So everything else is just a bonus. When 2018.3 drops, I suggest grabbing HDRP from package manager or just using a HDRP template project then upgrading HDRP in package manager. This will let you have 3.x of HDRP and you can drop book of the dead assets into it and it should really get much closer to what you want.
Basically Unity felt they needed to show off HDRP there and then and a lot of that stuff was still being made at the time. The terrain stuff is the next thing that will complete the puzzle though.
I think the real problem here for you (sorry if I’m mistaken) is that you were promised something but the stuff that was promised is not arriving in the correct sequence.
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I have rechecked the Unity roadmap and don’t see any of this listed.
Maybe if there was a centralized place to know the state of development of each of those things globally (instead of having to check each github page of each single feature) it would be more simple for us to know were is this going.
Sincerely, I have lost track of all official github projects for Unity. It’s like the company has externalized it’s whole development repository and is expecting us to keep track.
The real problem is I’m a developer and don’t like marketing speech by corporate suits.
HDRP is still in beta. It’s been announced like it’s done when it’s not even cooked.
It’s a bold enterprise, but it’s still in development.
Not like a work in progress as “we will make it better over time” but more like “the workers are building the kitchen as you make your coffee”. It’s clearly stated as “not production ready” an prone to change completely like physically based shading was changing in it’s beta stages.
My problem is NOT with it being late or still being in development.
I’m a developer, I understand development takes time. My problem is with the marketing stunt of announcing things that are still in development as if they were already done and implemented when it’s clearly not the case.
The highlights of Unity 2018 were all features in development. They aren’t even bundled with Unity 2018 and many must be even downloaded form github!
Those are not features of Unity 2018, those are the features of Unity 2019.5!
When Unity 4 launched, the highlighted feature was Mecanim. And it was DONE, and it was integrated and it worked out of the box. They exposed more internal bits to code as Unity progressed, but it was DONE.
When Unity 5 launched, the highlighted features were the new audio pipeline, physically based shaders, standard shaders and real time radiosity with Enlighten. And all of this was DONE, included and perfectly integrated with the engine even to the surface shader coding implementation.
Now we have plenty of official work in progress projects on GitHub that don’t even seem to be done by the same company but by independent groups. And they announce this as if it was done and then you see the actual developers say it’s NOT done.
I’m afraid this is feature creep on all it’s glory and I suspect hiring an ex CEO of Electronic Arts has more to do with all of this than any of the developers at Unity.
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Unity’s roadmap is incomplete at best. If you must know the latest progress they’re making on features you’re far better off watching the latest keynote and roadmap videos they present at Unite and other conferences. They’re both more in-depth and up-to-date with the actual progress being made. Unity’s roadmap is neither of those.
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Yes, I noticed that too. And I watch every keynote, but they seem more advertising than real information.
To the point that now, when they talk about a shiny new feature, I can’t help but think: “yeah, maybe in a year and a half it will actually be ready”.
It’s more like watching one of those 90s TV shows about future technology. 
I’m still waiting for my flying car.
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Totally agree with all your sentiments but you know, I’m not bothered because while these are promises and so on, I find that my game takes up all my time before I can really be that worried about undelivered promise X.
I too, don’t feel impressed by Unity’s marketing and sales aggression, and frankly, I’ll bet half of Unity’s developers aren’t impressed by it either because it does add a layer of stress that I try to mitigate with transparency like in this thread. But ultimately, I guess we should just ignore all that marketing and focus on the roadmap.
The roadmap is out of date, but that’s the kind of out of date that doesn’t result in the feeling of broken promises. It’s “ok I have that to work with…” and it works.
I get why Unity is aggressive on sales and marketing, I mean all of this sweet stuff coming isn’t cheap…
Still, HDRP isn’t out. And that by default means any BOTD promise can’t really be fulfilled and it’s just early access.
Not helpful for the hardcore developer, but we are smart enough to see past that and work with what we have I guess. Unity could be a little clearer it seems, on the roadmap.
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Gaijin Entertainment shows off it’s Enlisted MMO running on GeForce RTX, using Vulkan to do a custom global illumination algorithm that’s enhanced by Nvidia’s hardware support for ray-tracing. It’s important to point out that this is running with no precomputed lighting, which is part of why the non-ray-traced version looks so flat and bad. With ray-tracing, “pre-baking” the lighting and shadows is no longer required.
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It’s a nice video but obviously heavily biased toward demonstrating the GPU capabilities as there are already games out for years with similar graphical fidelity.
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