Can anyone tell me the difference between screen spaced and path tracer ray tracer?
What are the performance and graphics differences?
1 Like
In a nutshell:
Screen space uses existing rendered data and path tracer starts from scratch.
Screen spaced is more performant. Although, screen space just focuses on reflections within the screen space whereas path tracing focuses on simulating light just like in real life.
I recommend using Google for more information rather than relying on us to help you. It would save you time and would be much better.
1 Like
Screen Space uses an already rendered image to draw a reflection.
Pros of screenspace are its very good performance.
Cons are that it can’t be used for mirrors, and you can often see obvious edges in reflections.
Path Tracing is what causes lighting to look realistic. This is what most people would call “raytracing”, but its not.
Pros of pathtracing: It looks pretty
Cons of pathtracing: Not even top of the line GPUs can run it in game engines designed for it, and attempting to make one in roblox will result in an unplayable mess (200x80 reso, 10fps) that uses editable images or whatever, and runs on the CPU because you can’t access the GPU on roblox.
Raytracing is the process to get pretty reflections. You could say its step 1 to Path Tracing.
Pros of raytracing: Accurate reflections that can be used for mirrors
Cons of raytracing: Bad performance & impossible on roblox unless using method mentioned above for path tracing.
Overall, screen-space is the absolute best and go-to method for its performance. Unfortunately though, we don’t have access to the GPU nor can we control what casts screen-space reflections.
Can we make ssr on roblox? A guy made radius which claims to be the fastest and runable path tracer when its finished optimised.
No, we can’t access the GPU so we can’t make any actual shader effect.
Closest thing you’d get for reflections is viewport frames on a flat surface but they’re terrible on framerate and have terrible shading, and as I just said they only really work on flat surfaces.
Put runable in very big quotation marks there.
Its running on the CPU, there’s no bypass around it on roblox, as such the only way to get it to be “runable” is for it to be a horrendous resolution while pulling only 60fps WHILE multi-threading.
Actual graphics rendering is impossible in roblox. There are near zero ways to actually implement these features into the engine without modification.
Screen space effects = done on the screen. Nowadays, game engines (at least non sandboxed ones) lay out a lot of buffers which are basically storage tables on the GPU for frame data. Depth buffer is a common one, as it’s used for an important effect; ensuring that the right pixel is in front. However, it is key to about every Screenspace ambient occlusion technique due to the use to get depth differences. GBuffer nowadays is used for deferred rendering with position in the world stored, world normal stored.
Path tracing is more accurate. It isn’t a branch of techniques - it is reinvention of doing so. You shoot a ray, then a lot more from where that ray hit - brute force sampling is key to realistic results, as it simulates where light would go. Path tracing inherently gives you all the effects that the screen space family tries to replicate - as it is mimicking the way lighting behaves. It is the reason path traced games have such crisp reflections and realistic lighting.