It's such a shame that lens flares aren't in the path trace mod because to me, as silly as it sounds, those lens flares is a huge part of the original games look to me.
Before all these fancy RTX nonsense I always used to be mesmerized by a good lense flare in a game. Just like the guy that reviews toilets in videogames I used to be obsessed for light flares in my games and line them up by slowly moving the camera
I know this has been said a hundred times but I’ll say it again… if companies would just realize that these fan made projects INCREASE their game’s value and community and don’t detract… they make MORE money in the long run from a vibrant user base. Man…..
a couple of years ago, i ported the first doom map to Unreal 4 using the original textures plus handmade normals and roughness map, it looked like a whole different game :)
To be honest, the original game looked absolutely incredible in 2001. Look at 3:44 on the left, that's pretty good to begin with, though it just uses precalculated lightmaps. It used so much technologically impressive eye candy, like detail textures (which are visible once you're close to an object, in addition to the main texture), specular, reflections, even bump mapping, though very sparingly. What's even more important though is the art style and decisions they made. You could be handed a good engine made by another studio and end up making unimpressive environments. They not only made the technology, but also used it creatively and thoughtfully.
Path tracing does more for old games than new ones. I would still dearly love to see someone make a path-traced Deus Ex. That game, with neon and shiny surfaces everywhere, is basically the ideal.
@@theavidgamer6213 I don’t think I’ve played many games where I’ve sunk 130 hours and it seems like I could easily play for 100-200 hours more... for me at least, CP2077 is up there with the best of them (although I know some people don’t like it - but no idea why, I couldn’t find a single person that was able to coherently explain what they think is wrong with that game).
Yeah that's cause old games fake lighting was very crude, while modern games raster lighting got insanely good at "faking" it to the point the differences are minimal/a matter of taste.
It wouldn't really work since Thief's gameplay & noir-ish art direction depends on very deliberately placed, unrealistic shadows. Would still be cool to see though.
@@schlockd3830 Well observed, but I disagree, you can dim the lights and adjust the roughness cutoff to the point you'd get very realistic soft indirect, but still very dark and deep shadows. The reason it kills moody and dark atmospheric games is because of bad and haphazard implementation that don't account for the art and atmosphere of a game(like Metro Exodus), but it certainly can be done.
This is why I like limitations. They force developers to go with their own art style. Some game devs placed lights at places where they shouldn't be for lightmap generation but it still looks good. Realistic? NO. Interesting? Definitely. Look at Quake 64. I personally like the lighting. Many of the colored lights don't make any sense there but... it looks nice.
Serious Sam has aged better than most games of it's time visually. When I played it recently I was surprised how gorgeous some parts look. The blue sky contrasting with the the whitish yellow sand is just beautiful and a lot of it is due to the art style. The remakes unfortunately have a way more photo realistic look.
The dark interiors look nice, but it would probably be a complete pain to actually play since the game wasn't balanced for this lighting. You'll be getting swarmed by dozens of enemies in near-complete darkness, with only a tiny flashlight and some muzzleflashes to light the way.
You can see some combat in dark areas in the video. The flashlight iluminates the entire room well enough to fight and several guns emit light as well so it didn't look lik too much of a problem. Though it may actually be an interesting gameplay mechanic using things like the plasma rifle more in darker areas EDIT: I forgot that the other hitscan guns probably also have muzzle-flash that also illuminates the room, so what ever you do, there will probably be enough light.
Another issue is whatever is going on with health bottles. They become almost invisible because there isn't any liquid visible, they just look like perfectiely reflecive shapes.
It looks like the both the muzzle flashes and the flashlight provide quite a bit of illumination though (remember, this is ray traced illumination, not the typical worthless static illumination from flashlight in non ray traced games) and this is serious sam... the guns don't stop firing when the fight starts..
So it’s… realistic because the real world isn’t designed to perfectly lit all the time? Light doesn’t care what you prefer or what’s best for your eyes, it’s a bunch of photons following causality.
@@Azmodaeus49 why meh!?, serious sam is one the best stress buster game ever made, this is a good time for rdna2 and post turing gpu owners to play it again...
I’m pretty sure he was joking :D If something has raytracing in it, that’s 100% guarantee that DF will cover it. And they’re also huge fans of retro gaming. So them covering this is a no-brainer.
The HD remakes are missing some features such as gravity-changing level sections, but they've aged beautifully and run very well on modern hardware. They also have a Vulkan renderer if you use Serious Sam Fusion :)
@@Calinou yeah, those miss gravity tricks, but TSE HD has at least new 10 secrets. I would like also mention that HD versions also have some balance fixes.
The light from the heart would look better if it increased it's intensity as it pulsated. The surface area would increase, and the light should become more intense.
People have hacked RTGI into it with very good success. I think all three can work with it very well. I always wanted to use it with infinite, but after playing it the last time I think it has a GI solution anyway. Fully RT version would be insane.
nah i tryed it oud and its totally fine, but the problem is more that the pathtracing isnt really good, there is a LOT of noising, ghosting and flickering, and also the aiming is very strange because there is some kind of mouse acceleration you cant turn off..... its just not fun at all. i recommend the quake 2 RTX...... but its ok, serious sam TFE was only 7 bucks. but yea, even on ultra RT its not very impressive in this game, and the gameplay also totally sucks because there are constantly spawning enemys behind you.
It's interesting, but the ray tracing feels tacked on instead of meshing together and adding to the atmosphere. Some scenes look pretty good and improve the atmosphere, but others not that much and even take away from it. Maybe it will look better if it's remade from the ground up with ray tracing in mind. And WTF, no lens flares and fog? Blasphemy! 😄 These were one of the highlights of the Serious Engine and it blew my mind as a kid. They add so much to the graphics and the art of the original Serious Sam games. So yea, I think I still prefer the original graphics more. I appreciate the effort though. Maybe they will try to improve in these areas.
Lack of fog and also lack of any motion blur, modern antialiasing and filtering etc. make this game very hard to play on modern displays, like my ultrawide 34". Fast turning and running are extremely uncomfortable on my eyes. This is true even for the unmodified game that at least has the fog. I guess it worked better on the 15" Trinitron CRT monitors that gamers had back in 2001; the much lower FOV of smaller monitors helped a lot, and also the natural persistence of CRT phosphor which did not require motion blur.
Don't get me wrong, I love raytracing, but here - in any scene that doesn't have reflections in it - the path traced version either looks very same'y or it changes the art direction in a way where the original's less harsh lighting and shadows made the game look better imo.
For me this is one of those cases where the idea is cooler than the execution, which is pretty much how I also felt about Quake 2 RTX. Technically this is probably superior in every possible way to the original, but I just don't like how it messes with the original art direction. Taking levels that were designed with a certain lighting technology in mind and plopping path tracing into them can often completely change the way they feel and play and not necessarily for the better. Of course, this is all subjective, so don't kill me for this opinion.
I agree. I think the fully lit outdoor areas look great. Removing the lighting from enclosed areas, to the point the creator felt the need to add a flashlight to compensate, has to have a major impact on how those areas play. This is true to varying degrees in other areas, like how the new weapon textures make the weapons less distinct when in shadow, or how the mod creator (IMO) went overboard on the potion's glass and liquid. Honestly, the more I see of lighting "upgrades" (not just recent path tracing, but also new dynamic lights and color effects of other efforts as well), the more often I find the results can feel worse than the original game.
@@dnegel9546 Ray Tracing is one of the next steps towards much more realistic lighting and reflections in games.... it's just not *quite* there yet in terms of performance, ect.
I agree with this assessment as well. While I applaud the effort put into the renderer by the community, I still prefer the look of the original game. It is also impressive how well the original holds up for being such an old game. The path tracing removes more than it adds (in my opinion). The original art is quite good and designed around the limitations at the time, whereas I feel the path tracer is fighting against those limitations and often not coming out on top (because the art was not designed around a path traced lighting solution). Very cool project, though, and I'm sure the people working on it are learning a lot.
@xg223 also as a normal and in my case casual gamer/consumer I just don't think it's worth having rtx on exchange for a huge hit on performance or resolution. And in many rtx enabled games both take a major hit. I mean in the video that's a rtx3090 barely hitting 60fps on a game from 2001. In exchange for better looking water. 😒.
Awesome. Any word on the Nvidia studio that was supposed to be upgrading old classics with RTX? Nvidia announced it shortly after Quake II RTX, and given the dev time of that update it seems strange we haven’t heard or seen anything since…
I can't believe how much effort the author(s) put in, this looks great. I imagine it is deceptively difficult to get path traced RT looking so good in an old game like this, that wasn't designed around that kind of tech
Going back and "path-tracing" from a technical standpoint doesn't account for the ART team's vision / motives. That's why a flashlight had to be added- and I'm sure that's not what the original art team intended.
If you have to implement an entirely new mechanic to make the game visible, then you've probably in some wary majorly distorted the original intention of the artwork. Looks great in exterior shots, but interior is an epilepsy-inducing headache.
Seeing the boulder in the gun's reflection at 16:38 is both funny and amazing. I still can't believe we're at this point in graphics, and it's still young.
I am glad the Ray-Tracing affects have been made for the classic version, because the classic version also has special gravity mechanics from Second Encounter (as well as the multiplayer game). Not to say that the HD version should not also get Ray Tracing.
Sometimes more accurate =/= better looking. For example at 5:00, the non ray traced version just looks more pleasing to the eye, despite the lighting being inaccurate.
To me, the ray-traced one just looks way better in that particular scene, but I do agree in parts where the game is pitch black, the game's art style just doesn't mesh well there.
Peeps are still looking for ways to discredit the value of ray tracing. The original look being better isn't a reason to not experiment with new tech and the ways it can change games. This feels like the old "graphics don't matter" folks from years past, seemingly angry at cutting edge tech and the people who enjoy the innovation involved.
Digital foundry, please do a modern tech review on battlefield 3. It's a phenomenal 10 year old game that still holds up surprisingly well in terms of graphics and gameplay. This is suprising, since its approach in its art style is realism. Nice video by the way.
BF3 very much looks like a product from the late 2000s early 2010s too me with it's horrible, ever present blue ting on everything. I don't think it ages well at all.
ermm idk about that, 2011 gave use BF3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Crysis 2, Rage....I dont think any part of this ermm remaster makes it look like it belongs amongst those. Not to harp on it though, I love this crap, I want this to be done for WAY more older titles (Like Ngreedia said they would.....)
Eh, not really. Poly count and texture detail is still untouched and thus makes the game look extremely archaic. Path tracing for a game that came out only a few years later, like Half-Life 2, or other games from around the mid 2000s, could bring them up to early 2010-levels, simply because the poly count and texture detail increase for that period wasn't as dramatic as the early 2000s. The increase in poly count and texture detail from 2001 to just 2004 is huge. This still doesn't really outgrow its 2001 look despite the increase in lighting quality and texture resolution (it does look damn good though, it's just still very noticeably 20 years old)
Dude heck yeah! I was just thinking about the original a few weeks back. Those were very zen like games. The quiet lack of music (mostly), the slow paced exploration and tricky ass jumps. I would love a reason to replay them.
for the games i have tried in vr, it is THE best. Every game ever: are you a rightie or a leftie? Sam: haha, just use any/both! I just love how croteam's ports are ambidextrous.
Never really cared for the serious sam games but this is definitely impressive none the less. For SS fans i hope Croteam notices this and makes it an official version of the game.
Simple. Look how many polygons are in many of the models. The best example is the small spider enemy. You know, the one that can come in swarms of hundreds, potentially...
THIS is what I imagined "next gen" gaming to be for the past 20 years, and it's crazy that this is mostly being done more effectively for older games... It's crazy how behind we were lagging and how we accepted it for this long
15:00 it looks beautiful. You know they say 'time flies when you're having fun'. Well that video seemed to pass in about three to four minutes. (It would be great if Croteam let this be a workable mod on Steam. A mod with all the stuff you need to play it, included in the download.)
The lack of fog and lens flares really are a bummer, but overall it looks amazing. Still I think the best retro gone ray traced yet is still Quake II and Super Mario 64 haha
@@JFinns as much as it's an amazing showcase for RT GI I don't quite like the Metro implementation, I feel it completely kills the atmosphere in a lot of scenes and the lack of real RT reflections for water, glass and specular reflections in general is quite a bummer. It's amazing to show how modern high end games could look "fully Ray Traced" but of the ones I've seen it's the least transformative RT conversion, specially cause Metro engine's Raster lighting is already so capable and impressive.
Would love for someone to do the same thing to Hexen 2. That was one of the first games I've ever played on my first PC, I still have fond memories of it.
Love the lighting, I don't know about the bloom kernel tho, I feel like the bloom needs to either be turned down in intensity slightly or needs to have a steeper, wider falloff to look correct to my eye.
Serious (ahahah) question, how's the state of color management in videogames? Are they using linear space? Is math calculated that way? Or is it that everything happens in sRGB o similar output spaces? I'm only asking because the game looks way blown out.
Sorry, final thing, just to say I don't know anything about color management or how the translate from different spaces in the games' render pipeline. This is just what I've observed as an armchair enthusiast playing games on an ultra high quality calibrated display (So I'm 99% sure its not a fault on my end).
Oh crap, my 1st comment got eaten, hope that still makes sense: TL;DR - its not a good situation, some games have rubbish blown out output like here and some have gamma issues in general, its pure luck, sometimes 100 million dollar games have what I'd call approaching a "broken output" and indie games have a "perfect output". There is no standard so sometimes devs are just using the knowledge they have and their own judgement to assess whether something looks "good" to them.
In fact, if it wasn't for the thorough analysis, showing the micro details, I wouldn't see the difference (minimum) between this RT port of Serious Sam and Quake 2 XP, which doesn't use RT.
When he says "path tracer", does he mean that this game is fully path traced, and not some rasterization-raytracing-mixture like the usual deferred shading approaches? Something like Unreal Engine does use path traced method as well, right? Do we call it ray tracing because it is only partially ray/path-traced? I'm always confused with the ray tracing terms in real-time ray tracing.
Pardon the pun. But when you said that it is seriously cool you weren't joking either. The difference is just mind-blowing and phenomenal. The difference between the standard and the Ray Tracing makes the game more welcoming and gives it that WOW factor.
About 80% of the time, all I see in those interior spaces in the new renderer is darkness. At least the original baked light maps, I could actually see all of the interiors without cranking up the gamma to an extent that would wash out the exteriors. I like the vivid colors of the original better too (everywhere). My guess is that all of this can be fixed with some tweaking in the engine.
You guys need to look at Tear Down, its a voxel based game with a fully destructive environment, and it includes software based ray tracing. its gorgeous, and even runs nicely on my 1650 mobile with a 9300h 4 core/8t i5
8:00 ANOTHER thing that the initial Doom software renderer from way back in 1993 had and was REMOVED from modern "source ports" of the game (except Prboom which mostly remained intact original code)
So in the case of path tracing, does that mean we're seeing "true ray tracing," the way CGI films do it (not necessarily in terms of fidelity, but in terms of technique)? Or is there still an element of this process being altered for real time?
It depends, in principle yes (TL;DR: OFF - WALL OF TEXT: ON) but the question, imho, has two sides: the engine and the assets. Keeping in mind that not all path tracers are born equal, in general you're seeing a simulation of how light works, the thing that changes most compared to an off-line path tracer (the kind being used for movies) is the amount of rays cast per pixel and the amount of bounces these rays are allowed to calculate before giving their resulting color, this is what causes effects like noise or "limited" recursive reflection and refraction, for example if you only allow 1 bounce per ray, this ray will be able to show a reflection of an object, but if said object is also reflective, its reflection won't be seen in the reflection of the main object (recursive reflection, the best example is the infinite mirror effect, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, etc.), if the reflected object is a perfect mirror, its reflection on the main object will appear as a black silhouette because its appearance is entirely tied to be reflective. In Quake 2 the number of recursions is limited to 8. Also, diffuse reflections require a higher number of rays per pixel to be accurately calculated, because the diffuse look originates from a supposed roughness of the material in question, rough materials scatter the light in multiple directions instead of deflecting it in a perfect and predictable manner like a mirror would do, hence there is a lower chance of a ray returning to the observer (in this case the original pixel it was shot from) and more rays are needed to resolve the reflection, hence perfect mirror-like reflections are much cheaper to calculate and that's the reason why they are so common in ray traced games. Also, accurate caustics (the light patterns formed by water, and other reflective or refractive objects) are exceedingly heavy even in off-line path tracers, so they're either missing or faked in real time engines (even some off-line path tracers heavily approximate them). The good thing is, from a theoretical standpoint, these limitations are bound to disappear over time by virtue of the hardware getting better, without having to change the engine: lets say in 5 years we have RTX 6000 series capable of doing RT at 500% the current performance, something like Quake 2 RTX might then use 10 samples (rays) per pixel instead of 2 and 16 bounces instead of 3, and this would automatically improve visual quality, especially in low light situations, because: less light>fewer rays>more noise>heavier denoiser>less definition and accuracy, whereas with more powerful hardware you can achieve the opposite effect just by changing the values of these parameters, a higher number of samples and bounces will always produce cleaner and more accurate results that require a less aggressive denoiser or no denoiser at all. The second part of the equation pertaining to old games is the quality of the assets, setting aside the poly count (how complex the models are in terms of geometry), very old games like Quake and Serious Sam had flat textures with no material properties associated with them, sometimes they included "hard coded" shading information (so called baked lighting, think of taking photographs of a lit cube and creating a 2D unfolded version of that, including shadows and whatnot) which doesn't go well with a path tracer (as path tracing is dynamic and requires "neutral" materials, whereas the original were static and the way they were lit cannot change), so these textures need to either be reworked or substituted in order for them to look right when path traced. In the so called PBR (Physically Based Rendering) workflow, materials have a series of properties that define their characteristics, the most common are: albedo ("proper" surface color), roughness (which can be defined with a so-called normal map), reflectivity, metallicity, translucency, transmission (transparency) and IOR (index of refraction, think of it as "how much light is bent going through this material", e.g. water has IOR of 1.333, glass 1.500, diamond 2.480). Even in its most basic form, a material like those we see in Serious Sam, let's say "stone", will need at the very least that albedo, roughness and reflectivity are defined in the material: it's possible to quickly obtain additional maps from the original textures with clever "tricks" (which seems the case in this game), however it's usually not ideal and it will likely not look accurate, the ideal workflow would be to recreate the materials from scratch using appropriate software (like Substance) that are capable of exporting the appropriate maps for the materials, but of course it's a big ask for a single individual doing it for free as it's very time consuming (and he possibly lacks the skills to do it in the first place). Sorry for the wall of text, some info might be less than accurate as I'm just an enthusiast, so take it with a grain of salt, but this is the gist of it, it's a complex subject.
Blows my mind how this ray tracing works. There's sun bouncing around the screen which isn't on the screen so essentially it's not there. And acts like it's bouncing on distances objects correctly, only these objects are not distant. It's just a flat picture. Fuuuuuu I need a cuppa tea thinking about it.
Nvidia needs to quit releasing half baked Ray Tracing hardware and actually come out with a fully dedicated Ray Tracing card. And give us a proper GTX card so that I can run games at 8K120, which we would have been doing quite easily by now if it weren't for the hybrid RTX nonsense.
Just commenting to say, I put my 4090 up against this and it hits a locked 120FPS without DLSS. Granted, 98% usage, but still. With DLSS, that drops to ~68%. Amazing mod. It got me to do another play through of my childhood favorite.
"Path traced version is lit."
I agree with this statement.
Seriously lit
It's such a shame that lens flares aren't in the path trace mod because to me, as silly as it sounds, those lens flares is a huge part of the original games look to me.
It's not silly, it's an integral part of the original art design. It should be relatively easy to add it back? I'm not sure why it was taken out
…. All the work this dev did for free…. And we’re talking about missing Lens flares? Really?
@@sanctemify yeah..? Just cause it's free doesn't make it perfect or immune to critique. Specially constructive criticism.
@@sanctemify What? It's constructive criticism. I'm not going "this sux lol"
Before all these fancy RTX nonsense I always used to be mesmerized by a good lense flare in a game. Just like the guy that reviews toilets in videogames I used to be obsessed for light flares in my games and line them up by slowly moving the camera
Croteam: Aight fam, you cool.
Take-Two: Let me introduce you to our legal team.
what ?
Thank god Croteam are under Devolver Digital.
Serious Sam games tend to have official mod support tho
I know this has been said a hundred times but I’ll say it again… if companies would just realize that these fan made projects INCREASE their game’s value and community and don’t detract… they make MORE money in the long run from a vibrant user base. Man…..
@@fensoxx of course, but then they can't release the same rehash yearly which makes more $$$
It’s quite crazy how textures and RTX alone can make some old, low geometry environments look close to photo realistic
Remember how works our eyes, we see the light, then colors. Serious Sam games had ever taken colors very SERIOUSLY!
Hd version
a couple of years ago, i ported the first doom map to Unreal 4 using the original textures plus handmade normals and roughness map, it looked like a whole different game :)
To be honest, the original game looked absolutely incredible in 2001. Look at 3:44 on the left, that's pretty good to begin with, though it just uses precalculated lightmaps. It used so much technologically impressive eye candy, like detail textures (which are visible once you're close to an object, in addition to the main texture), specular, reflections, even bump mapping, though very sparingly.
What's even more important though is the art style and decisions they made. You could be handed a good engine made by another studio and end up making unimpressive environments. They not only made the technology, but also used it creatively and thoughtfully.
Path tracing does more for old games than new ones. I would still dearly love to see someone make a path-traced Deus Ex. That game, with neon and shiny surfaces everywhere, is basically the ideal.
oh jeeze that would be really great actually
Just buy Cyberpunk 2077, with RT lighting set to “psycho” you get RTGI.
@@psionski as nice as this sounds, I'm afraid people want to play good games instead
@@theavidgamer6213 I don’t think I’ve played many games where I’ve sunk 130 hours and it seems like I could easily play for 100-200 hours more... for me at least, CP2077 is up there with the best of them (although I know some people don’t like it - but no idea why, I couldn’t find a single person that was able to coherently explain what they think is wrong with that game).
Yeah that's cause old games fake lighting was very crude, while modern games raster lighting got insanely good at "faking" it to the point the differences are minimal/a matter of taste.
My dream is having the old thief games upgraded like this.
Even those shadow volumes like in Deadly Shadows would be nice.
BRO! How come no one thought about this before, if there's one game that needs it it's the OG thief games
It wouldn't really work since Thief's gameplay & noir-ish art direction depends on very deliberately placed, unrealistic shadows. Would still be cool to see though.
@@schlockd3830 Well observed, but I disagree, you can dim the lights and adjust the roughness cutoff to the point you'd get very realistic soft indirect, but still very dark and deep shadows. The reason it kills moody and dark atmospheric games is because of bad and haphazard implementation that don't account for the art and atmosphere of a game(like Metro Exodus), but it certainly can be done.
@@victfv I LOVE how graphics looked during that little period like thief: ds and dx:iw. That really would be a dream come true
2001 wins over in art direction and aesthetic appeal in my book.
I can only agree.
This is why I like limitations. They force developers to go with their own art style. Some game devs placed lights at places where they shouldn't be for lightmap generation but it still looks good. Realistic? NO. Interesting? Definitely.
Look at Quake 64. I personally like the lighting. Many of the colored lights don't make any sense there but... it looks nice.
Absolutely
Completely agree, especially with the water. It goes from mystical and fantastical to drab and boring in this “update”.
Serious Sam has aged better than most games of it's time visually. When I played it recently I was surprised how gorgeous some parts look. The blue sky contrasting with the the whitish yellow sand is just beautiful and a lot of it is due to the art style. The remakes unfortunately have a way more photo realistic look.
The dark interiors look nice, but it would probably be a complete pain to actually play since the game wasn't balanced for this lighting. You'll be getting swarmed by dozens of enemies in near-complete darkness, with only a tiny flashlight and some muzzleflashes to light the way.
You can see some combat in dark areas in the video. The flashlight iluminates the entire room well enough to fight and several guns emit light as well so it didn't look lik too much of a problem. Though it may actually be an interesting gameplay mechanic using things like the plasma rifle more in darker areas
EDIT: I forgot that the other hitscan guns probably also have muzzle-flash that also illuminates the room, so what ever you do, there will probably be enough light.
Another issue is whatever is going on with health bottles. They become almost invisible because there isn't any liquid visible, they just look like perfectiely reflecive shapes.
It looks like the both the muzzle flashes and the flashlight provide quite a bit of illumination though (remember, this is ray traced illumination, not the typical worthless static illumination from flashlight in non ray traced games)
and this is serious sam... the guns don't stop firing when the fight starts..
The flashlight isn't tiny
So it’s… realistic because the real world isn’t designed to perfectly lit all the time? Light doesn’t care what you prefer or what’s best for your eyes, it’s a bunch of photons following causality.
A surprise to see you guys cover this, but I am pleased.
Meh
@@Azmodaeus49 why meh!?, serious sam is one the best stress buster game ever made, this is a good time for rdna2 and post turing gpu owners to play it again...
A surprise to be sure but a welcome one
I’m pretty sure he was joking :D If something has raytracing in it, that’s 100% guarantee that DF will cover it. And they’re also huge fans of retro gaming. So them covering this is a no-brainer.
Would be great to see something like this for Outlaws (LucasArts, 1997). What a great game!
I'd like to mention that the HD remakes of the first games are amazing and really worth trying out, they're lots of fun
I always wondered about those..
I played lots of xbla in the day but these didn't get released in my region
@@RodniDemental I wanted to buy it back then, but then my XBL-account got stolen.
The HD remakes are missing some features such as gravity-changing level sections, but they've aged beautifully and run very well on modern hardware. They also have a Vulkan renderer if you use Serious Sam Fusion :)
@@RodniDemental the serious sam collection consisting of serious sam FE HD, SE HD & 3:BFE; are on xbox one/series X|S and ps4/ps5.
@@Calinou yeah, those miss gravity tricks, but TSE HD has at least new 10 secrets.
I would like also mention that HD versions also have some balance fixes.
The light from the heart would look better if it increased it's intensity as it pulsated. The surface area would increase, and the light should become more intense.
I want pathtraced Quake 1 and Deus Ex 🙏
Isn't there Quake with Raytracing already?
@@AchiragChiragg Only Quake 2
@@deemster4249 i feel you
Q1 wouldd be sic!!
@@Tomico. there acctually is a very glitchy and unbalanced version
Man the original Bioshock would be a so sick with path tracing, someone make it happen!!!
People have hacked RTGI into it with very good success. I think all three can work with it very well. I always wanted to use it with infinite, but after playing it the last time I think it has a GI solution anyway. Fully RT version would be insane.
Love how the description says the game is Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
UA-cam is not very serious, it seems
I mean all ranked matches be like that in CS:go right it’s been awhile since I’ve played.
Lol
It's clearly source
Neat, but those indoor scenes are WAY too dark though. Gunfights in there with only muzzle flashes is going to give some people seizures.
Well if anyone is susceptible then don't play it.
nah i tryed it oud and its totally fine, but the problem is more that the pathtracing isnt really good, there is a LOT of noising, ghosting and flickering, and also the aiming is very strange because there is some kind of mouse acceleration you cant turn off..... its just not fun at all. i recommend the quake 2 RTX...... but its ok, serious sam TFE was only 7 bucks.
but yea, even on ultra RT its not very impressive in this game, and the gameplay also totally sucks because there are constantly spawning enemys behind you.
How to turn on flash
It's interesting, but the ray tracing feels tacked on instead of meshing together and adding to the atmosphere. Some scenes look pretty good and improve the atmosphere, but others not that much and even take away from it. Maybe it will look better if it's remade from the ground up with ray tracing in mind. And WTF, no lens flares and fog? Blasphemy! 😄 These were one of the highlights of the Serious Engine and it blew my mind as a kid. They add so much to the graphics and the art of the original Serious Sam games. So yea, I think I still prefer the original graphics more. I appreciate the effort though. Maybe they will try to improve in these areas.
Idk, for me all the scenes look better, except the one where lensflare is present on the 2001 version i suppose lol.
Lack of fog and also lack of any motion blur, modern antialiasing and filtering etc. make this game very hard to play on modern displays, like my ultrawide 34". Fast turning and running are extremely uncomfortable on my eyes. This is true even for the unmodified game that at least has the fog. I guess it worked better on the 15" Trinitron CRT monitors that gamers had back in 2001; the much lower FOV of smaller monitors helped a lot, and also the natural persistence of CRT phosphor which did not require motion blur.
@@opinali motion blur lol. Ultrawide with high frames yet everything looks like vaseline whenever you turn or move. Yeah, great idea
Path traced lighting really is a “just stick it on (and do lot’s of work to make it work) and your game will look amazing.
Don't get me wrong, I love raytracing, but here - in any scene that doesn't have reflections in it - the path traced version either looks very same'y or it changes the art direction in a way where the original's less harsh lighting and shadows made the game look better imo.
For me this is one of those cases where the idea is cooler than the execution, which is pretty much how I also felt about Quake 2 RTX. Technically this is probably superior in every possible way to the original, but I just don't like how it messes with the original art direction. Taking levels that were designed with a certain lighting technology in mind and plopping path tracing into them can often completely change the way they feel and play and not necessarily for the better.
Of course, this is all subjective, so don't kill me for this opinion.
I agree. I think the fully lit outdoor areas look great. Removing the lighting from enclosed areas, to the point the creator felt the need to add a flashlight to compensate, has to have a major impact on how those areas play. This is true to varying degrees in other areas, like how the new weapon textures make the weapons less distinct when in shadow, or how the mod creator (IMO) went overboard on the potion's glass and liquid. Honestly, the more I see of lighting "upgrades" (not just recent path tracing, but also new dynamic lights and color effects of other efforts as well), the more often I find the results can feel worse than the original game.
I agree. I just don't see the hype behind rtx.
@@dnegel9546 Ray Tracing is one of the next steps towards much more realistic lighting and reflections in games.... it's just not *quite* there yet in terms of performance, ect.
I agree with this assessment as well. While I applaud the effort put into the renderer by the community, I still prefer the look of the original game. It is also impressive how well the original holds up for being such an old game. The path tracing removes more than it adds (in my opinion). The original art is quite good and designed around the limitations at the time, whereas I feel the path tracer is fighting against those limitations and often not coming out on top (because the art was not designed around a path traced lighting solution). Very cool project, though, and I'm sure the people working on it are learning a lot.
@xg223 also as a normal and in my case casual gamer/consumer I just don't think it's worth having rtx on exchange for a huge hit on performance or resolution. And in many rtx enabled games both take a major hit.
I mean in the video that's a rtx3090 barely hitting 60fps on a game from 2001. In exchange for better looking water. 😒.
Man, this game still gives me warm feelings 20 years after discovering it 😍
It wasn't a big release at all, so I am glad I stumbled across this title!
The interiors look way too dark. Total darkness isn't improved atmosphere
What is this? Doom 3?
Awesome. Any word on the Nvidia studio that was supposed to be upgrading old classics with RTX? Nvidia announced it shortly after Quake II RTX, and given the dev time of that update it seems strange we haven’t heard or seen anything since…
I can't believe how much effort the author(s) put in, this looks great. I imagine it is deceptively difficult to get path traced RT looking so good in an old game like this, that wasn't designed around that kind of tech
Ah one of my favourite games. I remember playing it flawlessly with my 8600 GT.
Going back and "path-tracing" from a technical standpoint doesn't account for the ART team's vision / motives. That's why a flashlight had to be added- and I'm sure that's not what the original art team intended.
Wow.. finally more love for Serious Sam series. Just wow.
... and don't it look good.
Oh wow, cool to see a video about this project. I was one of the testers. lol
0:26 that desktop and those icons are pure nostalgia for me
All shotguns need to be that shiny in every game now
I never realized "unmotivated" (5:55) was such a tricky word to pronounce.
If you have to implement an entirely new mechanic to make the game visible, then you've probably in some wary majorly distorted the original intention of the artwork. Looks great in exterior shots, but interior is an epilepsy-inducing headache.
I would assume the overly bright interiors were done for gameplay. I can't imagine anyone would make it look so hideous because of art direction.
I don't think exterior shots look great either.
This game with Raytrancing like a childhood memory.
They've now added DLSS support and I'd love to see how that improves performance in certain scenes.
Seeing the boulder in the gun's reflection at 16:38 is both funny and amazing. I still can't believe we're at this point in graphics, and it's still young.
I am glad the Ray-Tracing affects have been made for the classic version, because the classic version also has special gravity mechanics from Second Encounter (as well as the multiplayer game). Not to say that the HD version should not also get Ray Tracing.
I'm cool with technology advancements, but I wish there was a way to do all this without crushing the original art direction.
U trippin
Sometimes more accurate =/= better looking. For example at 5:00, the non ray traced version just looks more pleasing to the eye, despite the lighting being inaccurate.
To me, the ray-traced one just looks way better in that particular scene, but I do agree in parts where the game is pitch black, the game's art style just doesn't mesh well there.
Peeps are still looking for ways to discredit the value of ray tracing. The original look being better isn't a reason to not experiment with new tech and the ways it can change games. This feels like the old "graphics don't matter" folks from years past, seemingly angry at cutting edge tech and the people who enjoy the innovation involved.
I don’t like the dark halls but the muzzle flash lighting them up is awesome
I love the green reflection on the walls from the green bullets.
Serious Sam was the shit back in the day! It was so fun
Digital foundry, please do a modern tech review on battlefield 3. It's a phenomenal 10 year old game that still holds up surprisingly well in terms of graphics and gameplay. This is suprising, since its approach in its art style is realism. Nice video by the way.
Yeah, they should do all the 2011 classics from 10 years ago: Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Crysis 2, Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
BF3 very much looks like a product from the late 2000s early 2010s too me with it's horrible, ever present blue ting on everything. I don't think it ages well at all.
It's crazy how pathtracing alone can make a game from 2001 look like it could've released in 2011
To be it looks like 2002 game under the same generation..
ermm idk about that, 2011 gave use BF3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, Crysis 2, Rage....I dont think any part of this ermm remaster makes it look like it belongs amongst those.
Not to harp on it though, I love this crap, I want this to be done for WAY more older titles (Like Ngreedia said they would.....)
still look like crap tho
Eh, not really. Poly count and texture detail is still untouched and thus makes the game look extremely archaic. Path tracing for a game that came out only a few years later, like Half-Life 2, or other games from around the mid 2000s, could bring them up to early 2010-levels, simply because the poly count and texture detail increase for that period wasn't as dramatic as the early 2000s. The increase in poly count and texture detail from 2001 to just 2004 is huge.
This still doesn't really outgrow its 2001 look despite the increase in lighting quality and texture resolution (it does look damn good though, it's just still very noticeably 20 years old)
@@KayJay01 if you say so.
but i dont see path tracing being a thing for 4-5 or more years
Original looks cartoony and dreamy, It has superb atmosphere.
This look more real and for me it takes out the enique feeling the game has.
It didn't look cartoony but yeah it had a nice atmosphere.
Not sure if I’m into the way “realistic” water meshes with the animated caustics. I think I prefer the stylized blue water of the original.
Would be nice to see a ray-traced version of the original Tomb Raider games.
Dude heck yeah! I was just thinking about the original a few weeks back. Those were very zen like games. The quiet lack of music (mostly), the slow paced exploration and tricky ass jumps. I would love a reason to replay them.
@@fensoxx Totally agree! The menu music give me chills to this day.
"Oh, this is going to look amazing!" ... "this looks how I remember it looking 20 years ago" :)
Fun Fact: Serious Sam is One of the best VR Conversions.
for the games i have tried in vr, it is THE best. Every game ever: are you a rightie or a leftie? Sam: haha, just use any/both! I just love how croteam's ports are ambidextrous.
Never really cared for the serious sam games but this is definitely impressive none the less. For SS fans i hope Croteam notices this and makes it an official version of the game.
Yeah absolutely.
Croteam doesn't care about SS anymore, they are fine with leaving broken versions of their games up for sale.
"SS fans" :)))
You guys should analyze Serious Sam 4, see why it runs the way it runs.
Simple. Look how many polygons are in many of the models. The best example is the small spider enemy. You know, the one that can come in swarms of hundreds, potentially...
@@JustinQuinn623 high poly models arent actually as big of an issue as people make it out to be, LODs typically solve that problem by themselves.
THIS is what I imagined "next gen" gaming to be for the past 20 years, and it's crazy that this is mostly being done more effectively for older games... It's crazy how behind we were lagging and how we accepted it for this long
15:00 it looks beautiful.
You know they say 'time flies when you're having fun'. Well that video seemed to pass in about three to four minutes.
(It would be great if Croteam let this be a workable mod on Steam. A mod with all the stuff you need to play it, included in the download.)
But does it play beautiful? 😉
The lack of fog and lens flares really are a bummer, but overall it looks amazing.
Still I think the best retro gone ray traced yet is still Quake II and Super Mario 64 haha
Minecraft RTX and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition are up there too.
@@JFinns as much as it's an amazing showcase for RT GI I don't quite like the Metro implementation, I feel it completely kills the atmosphere in a lot of scenes and the lack of real RT reflections for water, glass and specular reflections in general is quite a bummer. It's amazing to show how modern high end games could look "fully Ray Traced" but of the ones I've seen it's the least transformative RT conversion, specially cause Metro engine's Raster lighting is already so capable and impressive.
Would love for someone to do the same thing to Hexen 2. That was one of the first games I've ever played on my first PC, I still have fond memories of it.
I prefer the original look
Same. I still enjoy this as a tech showcase
Love the lighting, I don't know about the bloom kernel tho, I feel like the bloom needs to either be turned down in intensity slightly or needs to have a steeper, wider falloff to look correct to my eye.
A dream come true for the old serious editor map makers.
Serious (ahahah) question, how's the state of color management in videogames? Are they using linear space? Is math calculated that way? Or is it that everything happens in sRGB o similar output spaces? I'm only asking because the game looks way blown out.
It's probably the old textures fault
The lighting is way too blown out on surfaces directly hit by the sun and the reflections are set to several times the value they'd have in real life.
Sorry, final thing, just to say I don't know anything about color management or how the translate from different spaces in the games' render pipeline. This is just what I've observed as an armchair enthusiast playing games on an ultra high quality calibrated display (So I'm 99% sure its not a fault on my end).
Oh crap, my 1st comment got eaten, hope that still makes sense:
TL;DR - its not a good situation, some games have rubbish blown out output like here and some have gamma issues in general, its pure luck, sometimes 100 million dollar games have what I'd call approaching a "broken output" and indie games have a "perfect output".
There is no standard so sometimes devs are just using the knowledge they have and their own judgement to assess whether something looks "good" to them.
If you're calculating rays you should be doing the math in linear space.
Guess it's time to replay this bad boy once again ! Awesome video btw as always
In fact, if it wasn't for the thorough analysis, showing the micro details, I wouldn't see the difference (minimum) between this RT port of Serious Sam and Quake 2 XP, which doesn't use RT.
so happy to see that on this channel
It really feels like the alt timeline. A game from 2001 but its path traced and running at 1440p 60fps on a system no normal person can buy.
I would have loved it to work with the HD version, but it's still gorgeous!
The modder did a good Job. And now i want the same for Dark Messiah of Might&Magic.
Now we need path traced Quake 1...
My vote is for OG Doom
@@DarkReturns1 Doom would definitely look terrible. It didn't have light sources like Quake did.
You pronounce 'similarly' better than I ever could.
Ah, that introduction to the Beheaded Kamikaze. I remember it well.
It's pretty wild how a totally new lighting setup like this can transform even a 20 year-old game.
Sick 640x480 text on the first PC screen, and here I thought this was in hd!
Guess I should get back to being a patron.
When he says "path tracer", does he mean that this game is fully path traced, and not some rasterization-raytracing-mixture like the usual deferred shading approaches?
Something like Unreal Engine does use path traced method as well, right? Do we call it ray tracing because it is only partially ray/path-traced?
I'm always confused with the ray tracing terms in real-time ray tracing.
This is totally path traced, as Quake II RTX and Minecraft RTX are, otherwise you wouldn't be seeing these performance figures.
One of my all time favourites!
Would love to see another Croteam game get a similar treatment... The Talos Principle
I really need to finish that one.
You had me at "path-traced Serious Sam"
Pardon the pun. But when you said that it is seriously cool you weren't joking either. The difference is just mind-blowing and phenomenal. The difference between the standard and the Ray Tracing makes the game more welcoming and gives it that WOW factor.
RT coming to The Talos Principle too then? I can't wait
I think this video explained/demonstrated ray tracing to me better than anything else
About 80% of the time, all I see in those interior spaces in the new renderer is darkness. At least the original baked light maps, I could actually see all of the interiors without cranking up the gamma to an extent that would wash out the exteriors. I like the vivid colors of the original better too (everywhere). My guess is that all of this can be fixed with some tweaking in the engine.
Mate, turn on the flash light. And watch teh video before commenting.
You guys need to look at Tear Down, its a voxel based game with a fully destructive environment, and it includes software based ray tracing. its gorgeous, and even runs nicely on my 1650 mobile with a 9300h 4 core/8t i5
8:00 ANOTHER thing that the initial Doom software renderer from way back in 1993 had and was REMOVED from modern "source ports" of the game (except Prboom which mostly remained intact original code)
I hope the Croteam notice this and team up with this guy
11:05 Yeah, the pathtraced version really needs some of that fog. The image looks way too pristine, especially on indoor areas.
So in the case of path tracing, does that mean we're seeing "true ray tracing," the way CGI films do it (not necessarily in terms of fidelity, but in terms of technique)? Or is there still an element of this process being altered for real time?
It depends, in principle yes (TL;DR: OFF - WALL OF TEXT: ON)
but the question, imho, has two sides: the engine and the assets.
Keeping in mind that not all path tracers are born equal, in general you're seeing a simulation of how light works, the thing that changes most compared to an off-line path tracer (the kind being used for movies) is the amount of rays cast per pixel and the amount of bounces these rays are allowed to calculate before giving their resulting color, this is what causes effects like noise or "limited" recursive reflection and refraction, for example if you only allow 1 bounce per ray, this ray will be able to show a reflection of an object, but if said object is also reflective, its reflection won't be seen in the reflection of the main object (recursive reflection, the best example is the infinite mirror effect, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, etc.), if the reflected object is a perfect mirror, its reflection on the main object will appear as a black silhouette because its appearance is entirely tied to be reflective. In Quake 2 the number of recursions is limited to 8.
Also, diffuse reflections require a higher number of rays per pixel to be accurately calculated, because the diffuse look originates from a supposed roughness of the material in question, rough materials scatter the light in multiple directions instead of deflecting it in a perfect and predictable manner like a mirror would do, hence there is a lower chance of a ray returning to the observer (in this case the original pixel it was shot from) and more rays are needed to resolve the reflection, hence perfect mirror-like reflections are much cheaper to calculate and that's the reason why they are so common in ray traced games. Also, accurate caustics (the light patterns formed by water, and other reflective or refractive objects) are exceedingly heavy even in off-line path tracers, so they're either missing or faked in real time engines (even some off-line path tracers heavily approximate them).
The good thing is, from a theoretical standpoint, these limitations are bound to disappear over time by virtue of the hardware getting better, without having to change the engine: lets say in 5 years we have RTX 6000 series capable of doing RT at 500% the current performance, something like Quake 2 RTX might then use 10 samples (rays) per pixel instead of 2 and 16 bounces instead of 3, and this would automatically improve visual quality, especially in low light situations, because: less light>fewer rays>more noise>heavier denoiser>less definition and accuracy, whereas with more powerful hardware you can achieve the opposite effect just by changing the values of these parameters, a higher number of samples and bounces will always produce cleaner and more accurate results that require a less aggressive denoiser or no denoiser at all.
The second part of the equation pertaining to old games is the quality of the assets, setting aside the poly count (how complex the models are in terms of geometry), very old games like Quake and Serious Sam had flat textures with no material properties associated with them, sometimes they included "hard coded" shading information (so called baked lighting, think of taking photographs of a lit cube and creating a 2D unfolded version of that, including shadows and whatnot) which doesn't go well with a path tracer (as path tracing is dynamic and requires "neutral" materials, whereas the original were static and the way they were lit cannot change), so these textures need to either be reworked or substituted in order for them to look right when path traced.
In the so called PBR (Physically Based Rendering) workflow, materials have a series of properties that define their characteristics, the most common are: albedo ("proper" surface color), roughness (which can be defined with a so-called normal map), reflectivity, metallicity, translucency, transmission (transparency) and IOR (index of refraction, think of it as "how much light is bent going through this material", e.g. water has IOR of 1.333, glass 1.500, diamond 2.480). Even in its most basic form, a material like those we see in Serious Sam, let's say "stone", will need at the very least that albedo, roughness and reflectivity are defined in the material: it's possible to quickly obtain additional maps from the original textures with clever "tricks" (which seems the case in this game), however it's usually not ideal and it will likely not look accurate, the ideal workflow would be to recreate the materials from scratch using appropriate software (like Substance) that are capable of exporting the appropriate maps for the materials, but of course it's a big ask for a single individual doing it for free as it's very time consuming (and he possibly lacks the skills to do it in the first place).
Sorry for the wall of text, some info might be less than accurate as I'm just an enthusiast, so take it with a grain of salt, but this is the gist of it, it's a complex subject.
8:18 looks quite cool
will you make tales of arise pc review? it would be so nice to see how tales of technology have evolved since the last one
The Bloom is too insane you can't even see the heart powerup anymore, geez...
This looks spectacular, and to think it comes from a single person. 😳😳👏🏻👏🏻💪🏻💪🏻
I really hope someone gets around giving the RTX treatment to Undying.
Undying was an amazing game!
@@soundofmuzakk indeed, it was. 😊
Blows my mind how this ray tracing works. There's sun bouncing around the screen which isn't on the screen so essentially it's not there. And acts like it's bouncing on distances objects correctly, only these objects are not distant. It's just a flat picture. Fuuuuuu I need a cuppa tea thinking about it.
I know the original was no half life 2 but for a 2001 game the lighting still looks good today in most scenes
Nvidia needs to quit releasing half baked Ray Tracing hardware and actually come out with a fully dedicated Ray Tracing card.
And give us a proper GTX card so that I can run games at 8K120, which we would have been doing quite easily by now if it weren't for the hybrid RTX nonsense.
Just commenting to say, I put my 4090 up against this and it hits a locked 120FPS without DLSS. Granted, 98% usage, but still. With DLSS, that drops to ~68%. Amazing mod. It got me to do another play through of my childhood favorite.
9:10 Farcry did this too back in 2004. 👍🏻
I am now convinced that all games released before 2010 can have Raytracing enabled if a developer is focused enough
I ain't gonna lie the pool area looked friggin dope for 2001 but then you switch to RT and dayum.
10:34 I wasn't going to say anything, but now that you've mentioned it...
You should look at how Serious Sam 4 looks and runs. You will have a field day.
this game is so pretty even without the path traced GI
Now that's... Seriously Serious!
Oh my God I love this. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
and yet its still more technically impressive if we had a mod that prevents bodies from despawning.....which we don't
Would of been more impressed if they updated the last Serious Sam title.