I remember I posted that same exact video in a gamedev community.
There was always been some interest in real-time path tracing; but technical limitations: when realtime path tracing is shown, they always try to emphasize it with free movement camera.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y
While a free-move camera with photorealistic color may be impressive, unlucky that's immediately show where path tracing fall short: noise effect tend to be more visible when the whole screen is updated.
It appears to me that another mistake they do in showcasing real-time path tracing... is use extremely low-poly models:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x19sIltR0qU
I am talking about speculation, my competence in path tracing is not that great (hopefully I'll be corrected here, so I can improve my knowledge on this issue).
Isn't one of the advances of path tracing (over raster) the possibility to have much detailed (very high poly) models than raster?
Of course, this would take more VRAM, but another advance woldn't be the less need of all the 2k/4k textures a PBR raster render would need (also, less or no need for LODs); would that be another relevant advance?
Vertex colours: if we're using high poly models, vertex colours could reach a certain grade of detail... would they work as substitute of the classic raster's PBR albedo texture map (no need of UV at all!
) ?
A game like Double Dragon (side scrolling brawler) could be optimal for a real time rendering engine? Becouse:
- It's action based
- camera move very slowly: the perspective change very little,in a very predictable way (object in foreground can be blurred, so you can move big object with relatively small number of rays; I think they used a similar trick in
video about of StarWars made by Unreal/Nvidia. notice how camera does actually move very little (jerky moments to make it "alive" seems to be more a combination of pan and zoom in post-processing )
- "sprites" (actual 3d highpoly models) move also quite practicably on a flat surface, also they tend to be distant.. so the "square" in which these models are are little and more rays can be shoot in there safely
- if camera move always/only in one direction, it's could be easier to render the offscreen part (on the left)... so there's supposed to do less work when the actual camera pan on the right.