793
Anon turns on raytracing (sh.itjust.works)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 39 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org 21 points 1 month ago

Don't forget that temporal smear. I like to apply vaseline directly onto my monitor instead.

[-] HereIAm@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Don't forget the 10 shadow copies of my car/weapon following me around. It's like someone really liked having a trailing mouse cursor and thought everything should have it

[-] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

It's not just a time limitation either tho, it also opens up a lot of room for artistic direction and game design

I don't think you could possibly make something like Control's shiny black blocks world look decent without raytraced reflections.

Also anything with significantly large dynamic geometry usually either needs like half of the level file size to be duplicated for every possible state, or some form of raytracing, to work at all. (There's also things like voxel cone tracing that do their own optimized tracing but they also don't really work in 100% of situations and come with their own visual downsides)

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

It's like when the unity game engine came out, somehow IMO, instead of having to program the whole thing up to your specific game, now everyone could make a 3D platformer.

It does, again IMO, take the soul out of games.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

Heh, I can appreciate that. That was also said when people stop using ASM and again when games started running in Windows. Not running games in dos felt really icky.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

True, even if there weren't that windows border, you just knew windows were lurking behind the game somewhere in the shadows...

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

I think it was 98 when I finally had a computer powerful enough to play quake and burn a cd at the same time. Dual processor, SCSI disk, quarter gig of ram.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

I had like a 1GB hard drive ... I was poor.

[-] Jyek@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 month ago

The earliest publicly available engines were id software engines. Whenever id developed a new one, they released the old one for free. That's why we got a lot of doom clones and those doom clones became whole new genres of games. Thief, half-life, counterstrike, duke nukem, serious Sam, Wolfenstein, call of duty and many many many more games are direct descendants of developers playing with open source engines.

If your argument is that games are worse because developers don't need to build their own engines anymore, you are dead wrong.

[-] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Lol you just explained it yourself.

We won't go back in time to change things, and it was obvious what was going to happen, and it's not always wrong either, but you can't just brush away that everyone and their grandmother had to make a 3D platformer when unity came out.

Good or bad, it generally led people astray IMO.

There were lots of engines out there back in the day, the ID one was just the most polished (by far), you still had to know what you were doing, not so much with Unity.

this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
793 points (100.0% liked)

Greentext

6870 readers
307 users here now

This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.

Be warned:

If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS