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When I had a PS5 and Cyberpunk, I would sometimes switch ray tracing on and off to see if it made a huge difference. Well, the frame rate would be capped at 30 with it on...and I suppose if I stopped and looked around for a bit, it was noticeable, but honestly, I preferred the higher framerate. I've yet to see a game that really benefits from RT.
It's mostly developers that benefit from RT long-term. Not now while it's optional, but once it becomes a requirement, they can cut a couple of time-intensive steps from the development pipeline.
Can't wait until my GPU needs 1000W to run :'(
Ray tracing isn’t supposed to make things look better, it’s supposed to save development time
If you spend enough time on lighting you can make static lights look better but that’s just it, it takes longer so it costs more
We’ve gotten so good at faking most lighting effects that honestly RTX isn’t a huge win except in certain types of scenes.
The difference is pretty big when there are lots of reflective surfaces, and especially when light sources move (prebaked shadows rarely do, and even when, it's hardly realistic).
A big thing is that developers use less effort and the end result looks better. That's progress. You could argue it's kind of like when web developers finally were able to stop supporting IE9 - it wasn't big for end users, but holy hell did the job get more enjoyable, faster and also cheaper.
Cyberpunk and Control are both great examples - both games are full of reflective surfaces and it shows. Getting a glimpse of my own reflection in a dark office is awesome, as is tracking enemy positions from cover using such reflections.
But, it takes a lot of work by designers to get the fake lighting to look natural. Raytracing would help avoid that toil if the game is forced RT.
Gamers needs expensive hardware so designer has less work. Game still not cheaper.
I think RayTracing is pushed so hard by the industry because it gives manufacturers an excuse to force consumers to buy better cards to get "the very best". I have a 4070 and I never use RT.
That's why I will literally never support Nvidia. AMD isn't perfect but at least they play nice with open source.
i wish they would just make more gpu so they aren't so supply limited geez
Why would they want to do what's bad for them and good for us? They're a corporation:)
Soooo, there's a missing part here. The point (and drive) behind raytracing isn't making games beautiful, it's making them cheaper and less man-hour intensive to make/maintain.
The engine guys spend manyears every year working on that non-raytraced engine so it can do 150. They've done every cheat, every side step, and spent every minute possible making it look like they haven't done anything at all.
The idea is that they stop making/updating/supporting non-raytracing engines and let the GPU's pick up the slack. Then using AI to artificially 'upgrade' the frame rate with interpolation.
Don't forget that temporal smear. I like to apply vaseline directly onto my monitor instead.
Baked lighting looks almost as good as ray tracing because, for games that use baked lighting, devs intentionally avoid scenes where it would look bad.
Half the stuff in this trailer (the dynamically lit animated hands, the beautiful lighting on the moving enemies) would be impossible without ray tracing. Or at the least it would look way way worse:
I think raytracing is fine for games that want a lot of realism. But I'm playing games with monsters and fantasy. My suspension of disbelief isn't going to break because reflections aren't quite right.
But I'm pretty much in the camp of, I want my games to look and feel like games. I like visual cues like highlighting items I can interact with or pick up. So lighting is always non-realistic.
rt is a marketing trick very few games are made in a way that makes it look better
Raytracing is being pushed so hard by the industry because it makes things easier for devs as opposed to making the games look better for the customer.
There is absolutely nothing about raytracing which makes it "easier" for devs compared to a traditional render pipeline.
The extra performance rquirements alone mean you're going to be doing more work elsewhere to make up for it, and that's ignoring the current bugs/quirks with RT in whatever engine you're using.
The extra performance rquirements alone mean you're going to be doing more work elsewhere to make up for it, and that's ignoring the current bugs/quirks with RT in whatever engine you're using.
No worries, we got upscaling and frame generation now!
as someone who has worked in visual fx for 20 years now, including on over 15 films and 8 games, raytracing is most definitely not simply a marketing tool.
Maximise your RTX performance with this one crazy hack!
Ray traced reflections: on
Ray traced everything else: off
I'd argue reflections are nowhere near as nice looking as RTGI. If anything, switch reflections off.
Raytracing is cool, personaly I feel like the state that consumers first got it in was atrocious, but it is cool. What I worry about is the ai upscale, fake frame bullshit. While it's cool that the technology exists; like sweet, my GPU can render this game at a lower resolution, then upscale it back at a far better frame rate than without upscaling, ideally stretching out my GPU purchase. But I feel like games (in the AAA scene at least) are so unoptimized now, you NEED all of these upscaling, fake frame tricks. I'm not a Dev, I don't know shit about making games, just my 2 cents.
It's not a trick, it's just lighting done the way it should be done without all the tricks we need now like Subsurface scattering or Screen space reflections.
The added benefit is that materials reflect more of their natural reflection making all the materials look more true to life.
Its main drawback is that it's GPU costly, but more and more AAA games are now moving toward RT as standard by being more clever in how it handles its calculations.
Yes, I'm sure every player spends the majority of their game time admiring the realistic material properties of Spider-Man's suit. So far I've never seen a game that was made better by forcing RT into it. A little prettier if you really focus on the details where it works, but overall it's a costly (in terms of power, computation, and price) gimmick.
I never turn it on, the visual difference is too unimportant to warrant such a huge cost in hardware resources (and temperature). It looks different if you have side-by-side screenshots, or if you turn it off and on in-game, but if the difference is several orders of magnitude too slight to be worth it. Higher frames-per-second is more important than realistically-simulated light beams. You can't really have both in large AAA games.
Ray tracing is just a way for nvidia to proprietize a technology then force the industry to use it all to keep Jensen in leather jackets. Don't buy his cards; he has too many leather jackets!
I don't know but Path Tracing makes CBP2077 and Alan Wake 2 looks like a real next gen game.
Cy Ber Punk? interesting
There is a real reason to not use the "C + P" initialism in online chat these days... on some platforms it's likely to be flagged & reported by automods/bots/Eye of Sauron.
But I love CP!! It’s so next gen!
That's him, officer, right there ☝️🤓
I am waiting for the GPU's to use the rotating kinetic power of the fans to feed back into the GPU to give them ERS boost like in formula 1, when scenes become to graphically demanding. If you steal my idea that is intellectual theft and I will be sad!
Early 3D graphic rendering was all ray-tracing, but when video games started doing textured surfaces the developers quickly realised they could just fake it with alpha as long as the light sources were static.
The first F.E.A.R. had excellent dynamic lighting, I'd argue it had the epitome of relevant dynamic lighting. It didn't need to set your GPU on fire for it, it didn't have to sacrifice two thirds of its framerate for it, it had it all figured out. It did need work on textures, but even those looked at least believable due to the lighting system. We really didn't need more than that.
RT is nothing but eye candy and a pointless resource hog meant to sell us GPUs with redundant compute capacities, which don't even guarantee that the game'll run any better! And it's not just RT, it's 4k textures, it's upscaling, it's Ambient Occlusion, all of these things hog resources without any major visual improvement.
Upgraded from a 3060 to a 4080 Super to play STALKER 2 at more than 25 frames per second. Got the GPU, same basic settings, increased the resolution a bit, +10 FPS... Totes worth the money...
Edit: not blaming GSC for it, they're just victims of the AAA disease.
Edit 2: to be clear, my CPU's an i7, so I doubt it had much to do with the STALKER bottleneck, considering it barely reached 60% usage, while my GPU was panting...
Edit 3: while re-reading this, it hit me that I sound like the Luddite Boss, so I need to clarify this for myself more than anyone else: I am not against technological advancement, I want tech in my eyeballs (literally), I am against "advancements" which exist solely as marketing accolades.
The best examples of raytracing are in applying it to old games, like Quake II or Portal or Minecraft.
Newer games were already hitting diminishing returns on photo realism. Adding ray tracing takes them from 95% photo realistic to 96%.
