Graphics Update, v1.1

Interesting, I read Jons article about working on raytracing, very interesting.

About raytracing, another game funded on Kickstarter, Satellite Reign, they also use Raytracing in their game, I think if I remember correctly, they use it for real and accurate surface reflections and mirroring in general... looks gorgeous. Just great to see technology like this slowly being implemented in games, even if it is just for certain tasks.

Listen to the words, "(Photon Workshop) allowed us to get a sneak preview build of his latest post-effect, which is a screen-space real-time reflection post-effect".

It's not raytracing*, it's just* reflections created by using the rendered image. You can look up screen-space reflections and see that it was a shader that came out of CryTek (since Crysis 2). The game Warframe uses a ton of it, and having that much reflection looks incredible... Though you'll inevitably notice the defects, like a black spot where the character stands, and reflections that disappear as the reflected objects is moved off-screen.

*Edit: I love eating words. I don't know enough to say that it absolutely isn't ray-tracing. Apparently the technique gets advertised as ray-tracing in some circles, whether or not there are rays involved.
(Personally, my favorite method of reflections is still rendering the scene a second time in reverse. It worked fine in DirectX 6!)

Well, I don't know enough either, maybe I posted the wrong video, but they definitely mentioned raytracing though. Have to watch it again I guess.

I don't doubt they did. My wager is it's just another case of...

They are not wrong, it is a form of raytracing. As is parallax relief mapping and many other techniques we use in rasterization rendering. It's one of the reasons I say a hybrid approach is the future, because we've been using a hybrid approach for many years now already.

It's just that there's so much more we could be doing with more complete data sets of the world.

I can't say it is much but I read a lot of siggraph papers for fun.

SSLR isn't that great for mirror reflections, in that case you'd probably be better off rendering a full second view, otherwise the artifacts are too noticeable. But for complex surfaces it is absolutely amazing and can ground the reflections in the world in a way that just isn't possible otherwise. Cubemaps are obviously static, and mirror reflections only truly apply to flat surfaces. On a complex surface you won't notice artifacts, or any details for that matter so it can be done at a low res, but you will notice that there are self reflections and that dynamic objects contribute to the reflection. Things that cubemaps just can't do, at least not very well.

It works well for this very special case only. Consider in crysis the chrome armor on the aliens, this is where the effect shines. On large mirror surfaces, even such as the ocean, it breaks down and they understandably uses a more traditional approach to reflections.

I still cant believe that intel has just as good or if not better openGL support than ATI.
And I'm even more amazed that my ultra low powered i5 1.7ghz tablet with intel hd 4000 runs the game with a better framerate than what most ATI HD 4000 - HD 6000 series GPU's with even more higher end processors are getting.