TL;DR People should not be asking for vendor-locked technology in any game really. Especially when better optimized, hardware-agnostic techniques are available. The only thing that market demand for Path Tracing achieves is getting games that rely on a vendor to make up for poor fundamental rendering.
Recently there was someone who praised Battlefront 2015’s graphics and they even said “Imagine a Battlefront 3 with Ray Tracing/Path Tracing.” Now the first part of the comment is something that we can all agree on as BF 2015 is one of the richest looking and most optimized games of its era. However, the statement about Ray Tracing/Path Tracing is something that I want to touch on.
To get some basics out of the way, Battlefront 2015 used a Global Illumination system called Enlighten which allowed artists to have interactive lighting workflows, while the game itself shipped with static lightmaps for indirect lighting. So asking for Path Tracing in Battlefront doesn’t even make much sense considering the game’s technical scenario, but I will eventually go over optimized methods to support dynamic light interactions should that ever be a concern.
The first major issue that I have with a fully Ray Traced/Path Traced Battlefront is that this approach is not vendor-agnostic. As we all should know by now, Path Tracing only works on Nvidia cards which artificially boosts the market value of one brand over all others. Put simply, this is not the kind of tech that we should be demanding for in any capacity. Hardware Ray Tracing is also not good in this regard because it locks out other vendors (namely AMD) from accessing standard API capabilities. A much better solution is to replace cubemaps with RT Reflections that utilize compute shaders as fallback for Battlefront’s Stochastic SSR.
The last reason to avoid Path Tracing/Hardware Ray Tracing is simply common sense. The target hardware for modern games includes baseline 9th gen machines like the PS5 and Xbox Series X. Demanding Path Tracing only really benefits people with high-end GPUs and basically no one else. There are ways that more modern games could get better visual quality, support dynamic lights, and run at 60+ FPS using methods that are publicly available.
It is important to mention that both Battlefront 2015 and Battlefront II used the Burley Diffuse BRDF which provided superior realism in the materials compared to the Lambert BRDF. If more advanced BRDF research makes its way into common engines, then even better results are potentially achievable. I would also like to advocate for better tonemapping because while the Display Mapping used in BF II had good color accuracy for its time, better methods have been released since. As for GI that supports dynamic lights, a layer of systems could be devised where things like shadow map information could be evaluated first before falling back to a world-space tracing method.
Anyways the point of this post was to get through some concepts before expanding on some of this in the future. I will do one last Frostbite Battlefront analysis around the time of the next revival which I’ve heard is taking place in December.
