The Sane Rendering Manifesto

the_sane_rendering_manifesto.md

The Sane Rendering Manifesto

The goal of this manifesto is to provide an easy to follow and reasonable rules that realtime and video game renderers can follow.

These rules highly prioritize image clarity/stability and pleasant gameplay experience over photorealism and excess graphics fidelity.

Keep in mind that shipping a game has priority over everything else and it is allowed to break the rules of the manifesto when there are no other good options in order to ship the game.

Do not use dynamic resolution.

Fractional upscaling makes the game look bad on most monitors, especially if the scale factor changes over time.

What is allowed:

1. Rendering to an internal buffer at an integer scale factor followed by blit to native resolution with a point/nearest filtering.
2. Integer scale factor that matches the monitor resolution exactly after upscaling.
3. The scale factor should be fixed and determined by the quality preset in the settings.

What is not allowed:

1. Adjusting the scale factor dynamically at runtime.
2. Fractional scale factors.
3. Any integer scale factor that doesn't exactly match the monitor/TV resolution after upscale.
4. Rendering opaque and translucent objects at different resolutions.

Implementation recommendations:

1. Rendering at lower resolution internally, but outputting to native.
2. Render at lower resolution render target, then do integer upscale and postprocess at native resolution.
3. Use letterboxing to work around weird resolutions.

Do not render at lower refresh rates.

Low refresh rates (under 60Hz) increase input latency and make the gameplay experience worse for the player.

What is allowed:

1. In case of a high refresh rate monitors (90Hz, 120Hz, 244Hz etc) it is allowed to render at 60Hz.
2. It is always allowed to render at the highest refresh rate the hardware supports, even if it's lower than 60Hz (for example incorrect cable/HW configuration or user explicitly configured power/battery saving settings).
3. Offering alternative graphics presets to reach target refresh rate.

What is not allowed:

1. Explicitly targeting 30Hz refresh rate during development.
2. Using any kind of frame generation - it does not improve the input latency which is the whole point of having higher refresh rates.

Implementation recommendations:

1. Decouple your game logic update from the rendering code.
2. Use GPU-driven rendering to avoid CPU bottlenecks.
3. Try to target native monitor refresh rate and use the allowed integer scaling to match it.
4. Use vendor-specific low-latency input libraries.

Do not use temporal amortization.

If you cannot compute something in the duration of 1 frame then stop and rethink what you are doing.

You are making a game, make sure it looks great in motion first and foremost. Nobody cares how good your game looks on static screenshots.

In many cases bad TAA or unstable temporally amortized effects is an accessibility issue that can cause health issues for your players.

What is allowed:

1. Ray tracing is allowed as long as the work is not distributed across multiple frames.
2. Any king of lighting or volume integration is allowed as long as it can be computed or converged during 1 rendering frame.
3. Variable rate shading is allowed as long as it does not change the shading rate based on the viewing angle and does not introduce aliasing.

What is not allowed:

1. Reusing view-dependent computation results from previous frames.
2. TAA, including AI-assisted TAA. It never looked good in motion, even with AI it breaks on translucent surfaces and particles.
3. Trying to interpolate or denoise missing data in cases of disocclusion or fast camera movement.

Implementation recommendations:

1. Prefilter your roughness textures with vMF filtering.
2. Use AI-based tools to generate LOD and texture mipmaps.
3. Use AI-based tools to assist with roughness texture prefiltering, take supersampled image as an input and train the AI to prefilter it to have less shader aliasing.
4. Enforce consistent texel density in the art production pipeline.
5. Enforce triangle density constraints in the art production pipeline.

@ThreatInteractive I don't like the video for the following reasons:

• You don't present any new information/findings, all the stuff you're talking about is relatively common knowledge and there wasn't anything new for me there.
• There are no actionable items, just 20 minutes of non-constructive flaming
• I think you need to calm down a bit, the world is not ending, there isn't some kind of a graphics mafia oppressing everyone - don't be so angry.

Good luck with your game and further research, I sincerely hope that you succeed.

Hi Kirill!
As far as I agree about TAA and temporal effects, myself prefer more MSAA / SMAA, Im not sure I agree about GI solution which should converge over one frame. I've worked with various GI techniques - LPV propagates over frames / RTXGI accumulate irradiance per probe over frames.
I think we still can try to keep geometry as much sharp as we can, however light can be spatially upscaled / temporaly accumulated because we don't have good solution yet, unfortunately.
Also a question, do you know is it possible to make friends MSAA and V-Buffer? If we render geometry and triangle indices into intermediate buffer, Im not sure how we can utilize MSAA here. Feels like SMAA is only option?

@krupitskas In the visibility buffer shading is decoupled from geometry raster, you can render the VB triangle ID into MSAA and then during shading pass you can fetch individual subsamples and shade them as if they were regular pixels and blend the result, this basically supersampling and I'd say it's not going to be practical. In theory it is slightly cheaper than actual supersampling because you render the triangle ID buffer once, but the shading cost is going to be exorbitant.

LPV doesn't have to propagate over multiple frames, you can run more than one propagation step per frame if performance allows.